Winner: Shield Technologies: Spatter Guard HT Plus
Shield Technologies supplies solutions that reduce the costs and inefficiencies in the welding and cutting process, while at the same time improving the quality of welding. The company’s innovative weld spatter product, called Spatter Guard HT Plus, reduces the amount of spatter caused when welding.
Weld spatter is an unavoidable phenomenon that is a result of metal arc welding and gas metal arc welding. Aside from being unsightly, it can cause corrosion and high stress areas.
Weld spatter is normally removed using manual chipping, or through grinding and needle descaling using compressed air, all of which are extremely energy intensive methods. The descaling and compressed air methods are also very inefficient, as they routinely have leaks that reduce their efficiency, while requiring electricity to power the tools.
By developing a product that prevents weld spatter, Shield Technologies has reduced the dependence on grinding and needle descaling, which in turns delivers impressive electricity savings and a reduction in the amount of compressed air needed.
Runner-up: African Clean Energy
African Clean Energy is a Lesotho-based manufacturing company that has developed a Smokeless Biomass Cookstove range.
The stoves, which burn biomass such as cow dung, mielie cobs and wood, are targeted at communities that normally rely on coal and paraffin to cook.
The stoves save large amounts of fuel compared to traditional methods of cooking and a single stove can save up to four tons of CO2 every year. They also have the advantage of being a healthier alternative to traditional stoves that produce smoke.
Almost all the materials used to manufacture the stoves are sourced locally, making them almost entirely a Southern African product.
The stoves come in two variants: a forced air model and a natural draft model.
The forced air model has a self-contained rechargeable battery to drive a fan inside, while the natural draft model is used where there is no means of charging the forced air model in rural areas.
Runner-up: Pioneer Plastics: The Little Green Monster
Engineers Wally Weber and Luan Schoeman believe that the first step in going off the grid is the installation of a biogas system at home.
“The Little Green Monster”, as they call their innovation, makes biogas or methane-rich fuel from organic waste, allowing domestic users to harness energy from their organic waste.
The green tank, which is similar to a septic tank, is simply buried in the garden and gas lines feed the gas to the kitchen.
The gas produced can be used for stoves, heaters and lighting, and each tank has a capacity of 500l.
While energy saving results differ depending on the quality and type of organic waste used, the biogas digester unit can provide enough gas for up to three hours of daily cooking.
This innovative unit aims to provide a relatively low-cost biogas system for the residential market that reduces the demand on the electricity grid while reducing the amount of waste sent to landfills.
Special Award: AngloGold Ashanti
AngloGold Ashanti has long been championing energy efficiency with the aim of reducing costs and the mine’s carbon footprint.
This year a team at Mponeng Mine, led by Jean Greyling, a water and energy engineer, designed an integrated energy model for deep level mining that helps to reduce the operational costs of the mine.
The model came out of the AngloGold Ashanti Technology and Innovation Consortium, which seeks innovative solutions to reduce the energy and water consumed by mining operations.
The result was a single thermal hydraulic model that captures all environment-related processes, including pumping, refrigeration, ventilation and compressed air processes at a mine.
The highly accurate system, which cost R1.8-million to develop, enables engineers to understand process interactions and interdependencies to optimise energy use.
The model has identified and corrected several operational problems with current infrastructure, and savings of 2.5MW were achieved on the water reticulation network.
The model identified 26MW of possible energy savings, a substantial saving for a mine with a demand load of 120MW.
This feature has been made possible by the Mail & Guardian's advertisers. Contents and photographs were sourced independently by the M&G's supplements editorial team. It forms part of the bigger supplement