Winners of National Instruments 2003 academic competition
May 2004
News
National Instruments (NI) South Africa hosts an annual academic competition, where engineering students from South Africa's leading academic institutions are invited to submit papers detailing how they incorporated National Instruments' LabVIEW into their projects.
The first place winner, Geoff Miller, walked away with the grand individual prize of a Palm Pilot, and secured NI products to the value of R50 000 for his academic institution, the University of Cape Town.
Geoff developed and built a combustion bomb for fuels research. The primary goal of his project was to develop a research instrument that would enable optical access to study combustion events and fuel sprays. LabVIEW was used to control and record several aspects of its operation.
National Instruments' branch manager, Michael Hutton, recently presented a LabVIEW departmental licence to Paul Schaberg, Geoff's thesis supervisor, and senior lecturer at the Mechanical Engineering Department of the University of Cape Town.
Schaberg thanked NI for the support that they were giving to academic institutions and commented that they were looking forward to winning the first prize again in the 2004 Academic Competition. "LabVIEW is an excellent tool that enables us to spend considerably less time on developing instrumentation, and more time doing research. The award of the LabVIEW Departmental Licence will allow many more student projects to benefit from the increased productivity that LabVIEW offers," said Schaberg.
"The response to our competition was incredible, with some diverse projects across the engineering science spectrum being submitted. These competitions show our strong commitment to working with academic institutions, and we look forward to evaluating the 2004 submissions," said Hutton.
Willem Krige, Michael Brooks and David Bezuidenhout, students of the Cape Technikon, the University of Stellenbosch, and the Peninsula Technikon, respectively, were the runners-up in the 2003 competition, and were awarded NI software packages. The National Instruments' 2004 Academic Competition is under way, and all South African engineering students are invited to submit their project papers.
For more information contact Michael Hutton, National Instruments SA, 011 805 8197, ni.southafrica@natinst.co.za, www.ni.com/southafrica
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