Naledi 2.0, the North-West University’s (NWU’s) solar car won the Structural Design Award presented by Euro Steel during this year’s 2022 Sasol Solar Challenge. 

The challenge took place from 9 to 16 September, covering an estimated distance of 2 500 km from Johannesburg to the finish line in Cape Town. 

As with all endeavours earmarked to better society and to save that which is precious, it starts with innovation in renewable energy, and the Sasol Solar Challenge promotes this. The key word is “challenge”, and the Engineering team at the North-West University (NWU) has proven itself time and again to be up to the task. 

Prof Febe De Wet, an associate professor in the School of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering at the North-West University (NWU), has more than three decades of experience in her field, and her passion is the driving force in making a meaningful contribution to her industry.

She is working on several projects that deal with speech technology and language resources for native South African languages Her current project involves localising Mozilla Firefox's Common Voice platform for the 11 official languages recognised in the South African Constitution.

Our world is speeding up, and never in human existence have we been able to search as fast, travel as far or delve as deep. The last century alone has seen a meteoric increase in the accumulation of data and we are able to store unfathomable quantities of information to help us solve problems known and unknown. At some point the ability to optimally utilise these vast amounts of data will be beyond our reach, but not beyond that of the tools we have made.

Over the past few years, there were not nearly enough school-leaving applicants who met the minimum requirements for tertiary fields of study such as Engineering, Natural Sciences, Economic Sciences and Health Sciences. This is according to Elza Hattingh from the Faculty of Engineering at the North-West University (NWU). She heads the faculty’s Xcel programme – an initiative that offers a second chance to students who want to improve their previous Grade 12 Senior Certificate exam results in Mathematics and Physical Sciences.

On Women’s Day this year, the Business School of the North-West University (NWU) had the privilege of honouring gifted young learners and students with great minds and the potential to shape a better future for all! The Modiragatsi Youth Innovation Competition finalists and winners were celebrated during a breakfast event at The Capital On The Park Hotel in Sandton.

It is time to buck the dusky trend. The national energy provider, Eskom, is haemorrhaging money at an unsustainable rate and is nearly R400 billion in debt. Equipment is failing, power outages have become the norm, while its energy availability factor (EAF) has fallen by almost 30% in just over a decade.

North-West University (NWU) students and twins Andrea and Marco Fiorita, recently received their degrees in computer and electronic engineering with distinction.

“Growing up, we were inseparable and always in cahoots. We made smoke bombs, took apart electronics around the house, build crazy contraptions and watched endless YouTube videos on how to make cool gadgets at home,” says Marko.

All these activities created an interest and stirred a love for creating and learning, and it came as no surprise when they decided to enroll for a degree in engineering.

It was love at first sight. Boy meets campus. In 2019, Franco van Dijk visited the North-West University (NWU) campus in Potchefstroom as part of a tour by his school choir.

“We saw a lot of the campus – it almost felt like an open day. I really liked what I saw and decided that this was where I wanted to go,” says Franco, who matriculated from the Ligbron Academy of Technology.  

Franco, who was born in Bethal, Mpumalanga, will be turning 19 in May and is enrolled in his first year of working towards a degree in Electromechanical Engineering.

Jacques Beukes of the MUST Deep Learning research group at the Faculty of Engineering is the 2021 winner of a North-West University (NWU) Vice-Chancellor’s Medal for his dissertation “Interpretability of deep neural networks for SYM-H prediction”. Eight vice-chancellor’s medals are awarded annually to the best master’s-degree students at the NWU. Jacques was awarded the medal for Engineering.