Latest News Archive

Please select Category, Year, and then Month to display items
Previous Archive
06 December 2019 | Story Valentino Ndaba | Photo Supplied
Stephan Diedericks
Pictured is an overall view of the re-appropriated taxi terminal model by Stephan Diedericks, winner of the 2019 Corobrik Regional Student of the Year Award.

If all works out, Kovsie student Stephan Diedericks could change the face of the Mangaung Metropolitan Muncipality’s transportation facilities and save the city millions in maintenance costs while generating income.

The Masters Architecture graduate designed an innovative model titled An Interminable Living Machine: Humanizing and Re-appropriating the dormant Mangaung Intermodal Transport Facility (MITF) into a living, economic systems of change which won him the Corobrik Regional Student of the Year Award. The awards ceremony was hosted by the UFS Department of Architecture on 22 November 2019 at the Bloemfontein Campus.

A living machine

Re-appropriating the Bloemfontein taxi terminal located in the Central Business District (CBD) which has been non-operational for a few years would mean that the building sustained itself, and acted a power generator both environmentally and economically. 

Diedericks was inspired by the need to improve the quality of life for the people of City of Roses. “This course helped to broaden my perspective on the power of architecture and the social change that it can bring to people's lives,” he said.

An environmentally-friendly concept

According to the young architect, the facility would be water efficient. “Bloemspruit channels run underneath the proposed site and water will be filtered through biologically that will provide water to the entire site creating a self-sufficient living building with water at its heart.”

A thriving economic hub

Diedrick’s 220-page thesis details how the site of the intervention was once home to Bloemfontein’s first power station and that it is this concept of power generation that led him to place clients at the centre of the project as a catalyst for change.  

“The Small, Medium and Micro Enterprise Business (SMME) division of the Free State Department of Economic, Small Business Development, Tourism and Environmental Affairs (DESTEA) serves as the catalyst and a power generator that breaks open the solid mass of the MITF. Several subsystems, including aquaponics and SMME training, feed of the main catalyst and in turn provide resources in the form of food and business training to ground-floor users and micro-enterprise users onto latch onto over many decades of growth,” he explained.
 
A bright future ahead

"The only thing that we have and you don’t is experience,” said Petria Smit, a lecturer at the Department. “Some of your talent far exceeds ours.” During the awards ceremony, she said it was a privilege to work with students of such impressive calibre.

The awards, which were hosted for the 32nd year, are a way for the Department, in collaboration with Corobrik, to reward the talent of students. Diedericks said his win was a great honour and worth the many hours he had sacrificed for this course. Having bagged his master’s, Diedericks’s future plans are to work for the City of Bloemfontein as an architect or on an urban level when an opportunity arises.


News Archive

Discovery in Scorpius constellation may signify clean energy for Earth
2017-01-23

 Description: Discovery in Scorpius constellation may signify clean energy for Earth Tags: Discovery in Scorpius constellation may signify clean energy for Earth

Earlier this year, a group of international astronomers
announced the discovery of an exotic binary star system,
AR Scorpii. The system is in the Scorpius constellation.
Photos: Supplied

See article on Nature’s website 

In future, stargazers and astronomers will look at the Scorpius constellation near the Milky Way with new eyes. Earlier this year, a group of international astronomers announced the discovery of an exotic binary star system, AR Scorpii. The system is in the Scorpius constellation.

Prof Pieter Meintjes, researcher in the Department of Physics at the University of the Free State (UFS), worked with four colleagues on what he describes as a “wonderful discovery”. This sensational discovery, which could lead to the production of cleaner energy on Earth, will be published in the research journal, Nature, early in 2017.

Model developed to interpret new set of measurements
The exotic binary star which was discovered consists of a red dwarf and a white dwarf revolving around each other every 3,5 hours. The binary system showed very prominent pulsations of 117 and 118 seconds respectively. The pulsations can be explained by a bundle radiation produced by the white dwarf star.

“These new observations have shown that the radiation is strongly polarised, a sign that we are dealing with synchrotron radiation here. Synchrotron radiation is produced by electrons accelerated to extremely high energy levels in the magnetic field of the white dwarf star,” says Prof Meintjes.

He developed a theoretical model to interpret a new set of measurements that was taken by the 1,9 m telescope and the 10 m SALT telescope at the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAA0).

Totally unique phenomenon could contribute to energy production on Earth
“I further indicated that the interaction between the magnetic fields of the white dwarf star and the red dwarf star induces secondary processes that specifically describe the behaviour of the radiation in the radio band and infrared band accurately. AR Sco is the first white-red dwarf binary system of which all the pulsated radiation could be explained by the synchrotron process, which is totally unique,” says Prof Meintjes.

According to Prof Meintjes, the value of the model lies in the fact that the processes which produce the radiation in AR Sco, can also be applied to produce energy on Earth.

 

Plasma reactors are based on roughly the same processes which apply in AR Sco, and with refining, it could be utilised to generate electricity in future. This will be much cleaner than nuclear energy.

 

The model developed by Prof Meintjes explains all the radiation in the system – from radio waves to X-rays – in terms of electrons accelerated to extremely high energy levels by electric fields in the system, which then produce synchrotron radiation over a very wide band of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Prof Meintjes is currently working on a follow-up article examining the evolution of the AR Sco, in other words, the origin of such a unique system and the final state towards which it is evolving. “My vision for the immediate future is therefore to develop a model for the evolution of the source concerned,” he says.

 

 

We use cookies to make interactions with our websites and services easy and meaningful. To better understand how they are used, read more about the UFS cookie policy. By continuing to use this site you are giving us your consent to do this.

Accept