MechChem Africa October 2017

⎪ SAIChE news ⎪

SAIChE IChemE SAIChE Board members: President: C Sheridan Imm. Past President D van Vuuren Honorary Treasurer L van Dyk + Vice President: Honorary Secretary: EMObwaka Vice President: D Lokhat Council member: JJ Scholtz Council member: AB Hlatshwayo Council member: K Harding Council Member: M Low Council member: BK Ferreira Council Member: HMazema Council Member: MChetty Council Member: A de Bondt Council Member: MMabaso Council Member NN Coni Member (co-opted): MD Heydenrych Chair Gauteng: C Sandrock Chair KZN: D Lokhat Chair Western Cape: HMazema Contact details SAIChE PO Box 2125, North Riding, 2162 South Africa cooking stoves,” he tells MechChem Africa . Lloyd was also recently appointed an Adjunct Professor at theChineseAgricultural University inBeijing, wherehehas beendoing some cleaner stove studies. “I also work with the Intergovernmental Panel onClimateChange, helping towrite, for example, the special report on carbon capture and storage – and they were kind enough to recognisemeaspart of the teamwhichshared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore in 2007.” “Chemical engineering opens up so many different and fantastic opportunities because chemistry, itself, is part of everybody’s every- day lives,” Lloyd says. “So my advice to students is, don’t be frightenedandcarryon learning for thewhole ofyourlife.Achemicalengineeringdegreewill provide the tools to understand a huge range of technologies and technological advances, withoutwhich thewholeworldwould be a lot poorer,” he concludes. q

Seen from the spiral feeder is a 1.0 m diameter 1.3 MW centrifugal crusher capable of crushing 100 t/h of gold ore.

“Evaluation of gold content was typically done by knocking a piece of rock off the face and sending it for crushing and analysis – and one had to hope that the piece you chose ac- curately represented the reef. “Our X-ray work with the gold mines in Virginia – done with the famous mining en- gineer Danie Krige, the inventor of Kriging – showed that ourmethod identified the gold farmoreeffectively than rock samplingdid. At someof the shafts inVirginia, the gradeswere not high enough for mining, while at some of the shafts that had already been abandoned, mining was still worthwhile. “The research information we collected gave themines inVirginia a10-year lifeexten- sion,” Lloyd tells MechChem . In1983, Lloyd joinedMurray andRoberts’ MineralsProcessingunit as aprojectmanager to finish off the Richards Bay Coal Terminal. “I was also just in time to contribute towards the design of Mossgas plant in Mossel Bay, which led to an offer from Edward Bateman on the project management side to look after some key aspects of the Mossgas construc- tion,” he adds. “As a chemical engineer one gets experi- ence in a lot of different areas: In the 70s, for example, some of my friends and I got involved in a skiing venture in Lesotho. Then we went into essential oils for the French perfume industry and, when one of our group inherited a farm in the Free State, we got involved in improving the technology used and the yields. We developed a safer and much more efficient way of drying lucerne, for example, which did not involve putting it into sacks near a fire.” Basedonanassessment of themaize seeds being used, Lloyd and his friends determined that only one crop in five seasons would produce good enough yields – and this data agreed well with the farming community’s

experience at that time. “By switching to a hardier seed variety, we could get a decent crop in four out five years and people soon becameconvinced that thiswas amuchbetter option,” Lloyd says. On nearing formal retirement age, Lloyd bought the consultancy division that he had been running at Bateman. He was soon involved in a huge dispute in Jordan. “A US company hadbeen contracted tobuild a plant tomakemagnesium-based fertiliser fromthe water in the Dead Sea. Although the design was good, the constructingwas not well done at all and I set about learning law and proving that the US construction company had been to blame. They had not supplied the plant as specified and had, instead, provided lower torque thickeners and low-cost propeller mixers in order to save money. So the plant never worked,” he recalls. Relatingwhy hewent back into education, Lloyd tells of a “brilliant” lecture on optics by Polaroid founder, Edwin Land. “Following the lecture I introduced myself and asked why he was teaching following such a successful career. He replied that all the money he had made had come from knowledge learned at MIT: and he would be a poor American if he didn’t pass some of that knowledge on to youngsters. “Thatstuckwithmeandledmetodosome- thing similarwithmy retirement,” Lloydnotes. Following four years at Wits teaching Environmental Chemical Engineering, Lloyd moved back down to Cape Town and took up a post at UCT’s Energy Research Centre. “And instead of retiring in 2009, as UCT sug- gested, I took up another post at the Energy Institute of CPUT: Looking at how poor people cook anddeveloping safer and cleaner alternatives. I am off to an ISO Standards meeting inKathmandu later this year, to help develop the standard for cleaner burning

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