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’ leading programming package, 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 the University of Cape Town, his academic institution. Miller 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, presented a LabVIEW Departmental License to Paul Schaberg, Miller's thesis Supervisor, and Senior Lecturer at the university's Mechanical Engineering Department. 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 this year's 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 License will allow many more student projects to benefit from the increased productivity that LabVIEW offers," he added.
Said Hutton: "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."
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, and were awarded NI software packages.
The National Instruments 2004 Academic Competition is coming into action, and all South African engineering students are invited to submit their project papers.
For more information contact National Instruments South Africa, 0800 203 199, [email protected]
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