From left: Professor Danie Visser, Dr Rob Schouwstra (Anglo American Technical Solutions), Dr Romilla Maharaj (NRF), Dr Megan Becker, Professor Dave Deglon and Emeritus Professor Cyril O’Connor. 

Professor Ekama is a civil engineer who lives by a simple research credo: “Locally inspired, globally relevant.” He has held a National Research Foundation (NRF) A-rating since 2006, which recognises him as a world leader in his field.

After qualifying from UCT in civil engineering, he started work on a construction site, but his interest in wastewater treatment was sparked when he met former UCT Professor Gerrit van Rooyen Marais, an expert in the field, who later became his PhD supervisor. He has remained at the forefront of developments in wastewater treatment ever since, primarily through a strong research group.

He describes his area of research as “fascinating” and says if you are looking for a biological process that needs to take place before treating water, don’t give up: “There are bacteria out there that can do amazing things. You are bound to find one.”

Widely published, with more than 150 papers on wastewater treatment in top international journals, Professor Ekama is also highly cited. He is one of only seven South Africans to be listed on www.ISIHighlyCited.com, an international website of the most cited academics globally. He is a senior fellow of the Water Institute of South Africa (WISA), and a fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa, of UCT and of the South African Academy of Engineers.

In 2013, Professor Michael Claeys, the inventor of the XRD cell, together with co-authors Nico Fischer, Brett Clapham, Theresa Feltes and Eric van Steen, published a paper on the use of the device in the respected Angewandte Chemie International Edition – one of the prime chemistry journals in the world with an impact factor of 13.7. The paper was also chosen by the editors as a “hot paper” for its importance in a rapidly evolving field, and artwork depicting the cell’s capabilities was included on the journal’s back cover.

The in situ XRD cell is proving to be a cutting-edge research tool and can be retrofitted to existing X-ray diffractometers or synchrotrons to enable materials such as catalysts to be studied at elevated temperatures and pressures in changeable gaseous or liquid environments. The construction and design overcome a number of shortcomings that restrict the use of current commercial systems and are opening up new areas of research.

Advantages over commercially available in situ cells include minimised dead volume and the possibility of co-feeding gases such as water vapour.

An automated control system for the XRD cell has been developed, whereby the XRD cell can be controlled remotely using a tablet. This control system is particularly useful for synchrotron applications where the instrument itself cannot be easily accessed during operation. A marketable, industrially designed control box has been fabricated, with a holding place for the tablet. A transportation case for the XRD cell, control box and ancillary items has been manufactured.

Collaborative work is being conducted with local industry using international synchrotron facilities. Two units have been sold internationally, in Europe and Asia, and interest has been expressed by other foreign institutions, including a global diffractometer supplier.

The only civil engineer among a distinguished group of mathematicians, physicists, chemists and engineers, and the only speaker from Africa, Zingoni explained how the mathematical concepts of group theory, exploited for many years by physicists and chemists to study problems in crystallography, quantum mechanics and molecular symmetry, could also be successfully applied in engineering.

According to Zingoni, not only can group-theoretic formulations vastly reduce computational effort (an important consideration in large-scale engineering problems), but they can also allow researchers to gain valuable insights into complex phenomena in engineering mechanics such as bifurcation, stability, vibration and non-linear dynamics. Such insights greatly enhance the capacity to predict unfavourable or catastrophic behaviour in engineering systems, making it possible to design these systems more safely and more effectively.

The written version of Zingoni’s lecture has recently been published as a research paper in the prestigious Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, which was founded in 1662, and is the oldest scientific journal in the world.