University of KwaZulu-Natal students engineer the future

SOUTH Africa’s future in engineering is looking bright with University of KwaZulu-Natal students leading the charge in solving the country’s medical and electricity problems with ingenious designs.

A top final-year student in electrical engineering and the winner of the Best Final-Year Engineering Design Project award, Jesheran Levien Yengopal, has developed a Wireless Sensor Network Device for Power Plant Equipment Monitoring which identifies faults in substations with the exact location of the fault.

He said, “The device is for Eskom, municipalities and those who run substations which have a much lower amount of security when compared to power-generating stations. It mitigates the adverse effects of power outages caused by cable theft in substations. We do this by condition monitoring via a wireless sensor to ease the reliance on copper cables.

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“How the device works is when there is a fault, the master node will illuminate the alarm. Currently, when there is a fault, they have panels in the substation switch rooms where the alarm illuminates, and Eskom gets a notification. This device, however, has a dashboard that can be accessed remotely as long as you have a wireless connection. When there is a fault, it updates the spreadsheet automatically for that specific substation, and an email comes instantly to that substation, detailing where it happened and the type of fault, specifying the fault. It reduces the time in fault-finding.”

Having tested his idea and the project with the national power supplier, Eskom, Yengopal said this device would assist municipalities like eThekwini and the state entity in delivering services to consumers. “I enjoy solving these problems. While I do not help people the way that doctors do, I get to do it in another way because we cannot function without electricity,” added Yengopal.

His peers, Sbusiso Gift Mpanza, a computer engineering design student, and Rinesh Kaulasar in electronic engineering, were also not to be outdone with their award-winning projects. Mpanza developed the Anatomical Range of Motion Measurement Device which won the Most Innovative Design Project.

“The device can be used in the medical field by various professionals to rehabilitate patients like the elderly by gauging how well they are walking,” said Mpanza. “It’s an ankle range-of-motion device with two sensors that measures your natural pattern of walking if you are injured or maybe limping. The device has two sensors calculating the angles, and then it sends the data via the internet. We wanted to quantify that so doctors can make data-informed decisions.”

Kaulasar’s said his military-inspired device, better known as the Target Moving Control and Tracking System, was his greatest challenge yet. “I had more time on my hands and fancied the challenge when I took up this project upon my professor’s suggestion. It’s a unique device that consists of two subsystems that automatically track the target, but there is no communication between the two subsystems.” His project was highly recommended by the institution.

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