Northern Cape Business 2020/21 edition

OVERVIEW
Engineering
Fast cars and superfast data are set to break records.
Sector Insight
The South African Institute
of Electrical Engineers
has launched a branch
in Kimberley.
Photo: SARAO; NRAO/AUI/NSF
Most engineering work in the Northern Cape is done on or
around mines. But the construction of a new university
from scratch, a landspeed record attempt and a vast international
radio telescope project are putting advanced
engineering at the forefront of activity in the province.
The bulk of the new structures for the Sol Plaatje University were
subject to a competition. From a total of 59 entries, nine architectural
firms were selected to enter the second round of the competition with
five firms chosen as winners to complete different aspects of the project.
The Sol Plaatje University Library and Student Resource Centre
earned Aurecon an award at the 2018 CESA Aon Engineering
Excellence Awards. The building on South Africa’s newest campus
in Kimberley also won a Fulton Concrete Award. It was designed by
designworkshop: sa, the construction work was done by Murray and
Dickson and Aurecon’s brief was structural, civil, electrical, fire and wet
services design.
Another striking building, designed by Savage + Dodd, was “highly
commended” at the World Architecture Festival. The multi-purpose
building encompasses a residence, offices, meeting spaces and retail
space on the ground floor.
The long-anticipated attempt on the world landspeed record
moved a step closer with tests conducted early in 2020 at Hakskeenpan.
The flat stretch of dusty land chosen for the attempt by a team called
Bloodhound is not far from Verneuk Pan, where Sir Malcolm Campbell
failed to go beyond the record of 370.4km/h in the Blue Bird in 1929.
The record now stands at
1 227.9km/h and the feat of
engineering required to
propel Andy Green (who holds
the record) past that speed
is awesome. Speeds above
1 000km/h were achieved during
tests, but the focus was on
how the car reacted to desert
conditions. The car has been
described as a combination of
a rocket, a Formula 1 car and a
jet aircraft. An extensive local
project, in which 317 members
of the Mier community cleared
the track, was funded by the
Provincial Government of the
Northern Cape.
High-level science and engineering
underpin the Square
Kilometre Array Radio Telescope
(SKA). Unimaginable amounts of
data are set to be collected in this
transformative radio telescope
project that is centred on
Carnarvon but has global reach.
The data that the SKA will
collect in a day would take twomillion
years to play back on
an iPod. The radio telescope’s
image-resolution quality will
exceed that of the Hubble Space
Telescope by a factor of 50.
The SKA will be the world’s
largest radio telescope, made
up of thousands of antennae
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