Thesis (M. Tech.(Biomedical Technology)) - Central University of Technology, Free State, 2010 / Introduction: Geophagia, generally referred to as earth-eating, occurs in many countries of the world, including African countries such as South Africa. A need was identified to characterize human geophagic habits and the microbiological content of geophagic clayey soil, including the presence of potentially pathogenic nematodes (geohelminths), in South Africa. Materials and methods: Questionnaires were developed to generate data on human geophagia and included demography, socio-economics, indigenous knowledge, business aspects, mining and hygiene practices of vendors/geophagists. A total of 52 soil samples (n = 52) were collected from the district of Thabo Mofutsanyane (Free State, South Africa), which comprised of vendor, topsoil, excavated and control soil sample groups. Nematode content were isolated using the Ammonium bicarbonate protocol, thereafter the nematodes were classified and population sizes determined for each sample. Soil colour classification was completed using the Munsell Soil Color Charts. Results and discussion: The questionnaire revealed that geophagia in this region was practised mainly by women of child-bearing age because of the taste of the soil. Vendors sell geophagic clayey soil (known as mobu) collected from the mountain- and riversides for subsistence, generally costing one to two rand per bag. Hygiene and environmental conditions are considered when mining geophagic clayey soils. Whitish-perceived clayey soils are preferred by most of the geophagists. According to the Munsell Soil Color classification, Thabo Mofutsanyane geophagic soils ranged from brownish, to greyish, to yellowish in colour. Vendor soils were mostly greyish, while topsoils, excavated soils and control soils were mostly brownish. No human pathogenic nematode ova or larvae were isolated from any of the samples, however 34 nonpathogenic nematode taxa representing five trophic levels were identified. These included mainly herbivores, but also fungivores, bacteriovores, omnivores and predators. Taxon richness (number of taxa) greatly varied in the soil sample groups with vendor soil n = 9, topsoil n = 24, excavated soil n = 16 and control soil n = 14. Tylenchus sp., Criconemoides sphaerocephalus and Ditylenchus sp. were the only nematode taxa identified in all the different sample groups, with Tylenchus sp. notably more abundant overall. When the median nematode population sizes were compared between the geophagic soil samples, no significant difference (p ≥ 0.05) could be identified. In contrast, the median nematode population sizes for all samples differed significantly (p < 0.05) from the control soil sample group. Conclusion: This study revealed that geophagia is probably not a vector for geohelminth infection in the district of Thabo Mofutsanyane, South Africa. However, the rich presence of non-pathogenic soil nematode communities in these brownish, greyish and yellowish geophagic soils may be useful as biological indicators of general soil health.

Published Article / This paper promotes the argument that although conventional postgraduate supervision is useful to address the research skills and competences of postgraduate students, a wider perspective is nonetheless required to educate and train any researcher (including postgraduate students upon their entrée into the world of research) to comprehend the demands made by research and how best these demands can be addressed. It is in this context that a more comprehensive concept of research education is promoted. The argument is based on the perspective that methodological understanding alone is not sufficient to assist a researcher in meeting the expectations of a research project. Research education refers to the training of researchers to be responsive to the research value chain. This includes aspects such as the formal research process, the importance of research ethics and integrity regarding the research project, the imperative to promote scholarship in research and the application of research results through technology transfer, innovation and incubation. Research education sensitizes the researcher to look beyond the scope of the academic research project and to extend the research to activities such as technology transfer, innovation, commercialization and partnerships. The aim of research education is to promote the wide range of aspects contributing to the understanding of what counts as research and its application.

Published Article / The objective of the study was to assess the medical waste management practices used by clinics located in the Polokwane Municipality, South Africa. The clinic personnel were not informed prior to the visit. A walkthrough survey was conducted on-site where potential health and safety risks were identified and noted. The health care personnel in charge of specific clinics completed the questionnaires providing general and detailed information about the treatment and disposal of medical waste. Frequencies and percentages were calculated from the data obtained. Data obtained indicate that (i) medical waste was not segregated from general waste in most of the clinics, (ii) rural clinics were burning medical waste with general waste inside the clinic yard (iii) there was no sufficient collection and transport of medical waste in clinics, (iv) sharps were disposed at various hospital incinerators and (v) most of the clinics did not have storage facilities for medical waste.

Masters of Art / Libraries use technology to improve the management of scholarly information and to provide faster access to information elsewhere. Over time, an important change was perceived in collection development policies and practices of libraries. Printed materials were increasingly replacing electronic forms of information. This research investigated the use of electronic resources by Postgraduate certificate Education (PGCE) students at the Central University of Technology (CUT). The research adopted the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) by Fred Davis (1989) as its theoretical framework.

Thesis (D. Tech.) -- Central University of Technology, Free State, 2008

Thesis (M. Tech.) - Central University of Technology, Free State, 2006 / This study provides an analysis of the impact of the introduction of the FET system at Colleges in the Free State, with reference to Motheo FET College. The aim of the research was to explore the perceptions of Motheo FET staff on the implementation of the FET system. It is believed that these perceptions have far-reaching implications on aspirations of the stakeholders with regard to the implementation and success of the FET system at Motheo FET College. The literature has revealed that legislation, namely, the FET Act 98 of 1998, the SAQA Act 58 of 1995 and the Skills Development Act 97 of 1998, form an indispensable past of the FET sector and also provide all stakeholders with a frame of reference and guidelines to manage the new FET system for Motheo FET College effectively and efficiently. The study also has revealed that success in the FET sector will be achieved by closing the gap between “education and training” and also ”theory and practice”. Removal of the fragmentations in education through a co-ordinated, flexible and high-quality FET system will result in employability and employment opportunities for FET learners. It has become clear that the above objective may be best achieved by strengthening co-operation between the Department of Education and the Department of Labour, in which case a new system of learnership should be identified as a mechanism to enhance collaboration between the aforementioned departments. A literature study, interviews, observations and site analysis were used as data collection methods. Four major themes were formulated from the analysis of data, namely, transformation of the FET sector, ensuring equity in all respects regarding FET matters and ensuring equality in all aspects within the FET sector. The important findings were discussed at length and thereafter, the summary, discussions, conclusions and recommendations were drawn from the findings.

Thesis (M. Tech. Marketing) -- Central University of Technology, Free State, 2010

Thesis (M. Tech.) -- Central University of Technology, Free State, 2007 / With technology advancing, more and more people turn to the World Wide Web to conduct business. This may include buying and selling on the Web, advertising and monitoring of business activities. There is a big need for software and systems that enable remote monitoring and controlling of business activities. The Mechatronics Research Group of the Faculty of Engineering, Information and Communication Technology at the Central University of Technology, Free State, has identified a similar need. This research group has created an Automated Manufacturing System around which research topics revolve. They want to monitor this Automated Manufacturing System from remote locations like their offices or, if possible, from home. The Remote Information Management (RIM) System was developed, using the Rapid Application Development (RAD) Methodology. The reasons why this methodology was used, is because it is the best to use in a changing environment, when the system needs to be developed very quickly and when most of the data is already available. This is a good description of the Automated Manufacturing System’s environment. The RAD methodology consists of four stages: Requirements Planning, User Design, Rapid Construction and Transition. Project Management is used throughout these stages to ensure that the project goes according to plan. Development of the RIM system went through all four stages and project management was applied. The final system consisted of a Web Page with Web Camera views of the Automated Manufacturing System. The application that was developed using National Instruments LabVIEW, Microsoft Visual C++, and Microsoft Excel, is embedded in this Web Page. This application is called a Virtual Instrument (VI). The VI shows real-time data from the Automated Manufacturing System. Control over the VI can be granted and will allow the remote user to create reports on how many different products was produced and system downtimes. A system like the RIM System has advantages in the business world. It can enable telecommuting and will allow employees and managers to monitor (and even control) manufacturing systems, or any system connected to a PLC, from remote locations.

Thesis (D. Tech. ( Mechanical Engineering )) - Central University of technology, Free State, 2012 / In this study an alternative indirect Rapid Tooling process is proposed. It essentially consists of producing sand moulds by Additive Manufacturing (AM) processes followed by casting of tools in the moulds. Various features of this tool making method have been investigated. A process chain for the proposed tool manufacturing method was conceptually developed. This process chain referred to as Rapid Casting for Tooling (RCT) is made up of five steps including Computer Aided Design (CAD) modeling, casting simulation, AM of moulds, metal casting and finishing operations. A validation stage is also provided to determine the suitability of the tool geometry and material for RCT. The theoretical assessment of the RCT process chain indicated that it has potential benefits such as short manufacturing time, low manufacturing cost and good quality of tools in terms of surface finish and dimensional accuracy. Focusing on the step of AM of the sand moulds, the selection of available AM processes between the Laser Sintering (LS) using an EOSINT S 700 machine and Three Dimensional Printing using a Z-Corporation Spectrum 550 printer was addressed by means of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The criteria considered at this stage were manufacturing time, manufacturing cost, surface finish and dimensional accuracy. LS was found to be the most suitable for RCT compared to Three Dimensional Printing. The overall preferences for these two alternatives were respectively calculated at 73% and 27%. LS was then used as the default AM process of sand moulds in the present research work. A practical implementation of RCT to the manufacturing of foundry tooling used a case study provided by a local foundry. It consisted of the production of a sand casting pattern in cast iron for a high pressure moulding machine. The investigation confirmed the feasibility of RCT for producing foundry tools. In addition it demonstrated the crucial role of casting simulation in the prevention of casting defects and the prediction of tool properties. The challenges of RCT were found to be exogenous mainly related to workmanship. An assessment of RCT manufacturing time and cost was conducted using the case study above mentioned as well as an additional one dealing with the manufacturing of an aluminium die for the production of lost wax patterns. Durations and prices of RCT steps were carefully recorded and aggregated. The results indicated that the AM of moulds was the rate determining and cost driving step of RCT if procurement of technology was considered to be a sunk cost. Overall RCT was found to be faster but more expensive than machining and investment casting. Modern surface analyses and scanning techniques were used to assess the quality of RCT tools in terms of surface finish and dimensional accuracy. The best surface finish obtained for the cast dies had Ra and Rz respectively equal to 3.23 μm and 11.38 μm. In terms of dimensional accuracy, 82% of cast die points coincided with die Computer Aided Design (CAD) data which is within the typical tolerances of sand cast products. The investigation also showed that mould coating contributed slightly to the improvement of the cast tool surface finish. Finally this study also found that the additive manufacturing of the sand mould was the chief factor responsible for the loss of dimensional accuracy. Because of the above, it was concluded that light machining will always be required to improve the surface finish and the dimensional accuracy of cast tools. Durability was the last characteristic of RCT tools to be assessed. This property was empirically inferred from the mechanical properties and metallographic analysis of castings. Merit of durability figures of 0.048 to 0.152 were obtained for the cast tools. It was found that tools obtained from Direct Croning (DC) moulds have merit of durability figures three times higher than the tools produced from Z-Cast moulds thus a better resistance to abrasion wear of the former tools compared to the latter.

Thesis (D. Tech. (Electrical Engineering)) - Central University of technology, Free State, 2012 / Radio frequency identification technology (RFID) has emerged as a key technology for automatic identification and promises to revolutionize business processes. While RFID technology adoption is improving rapidly, reliable and widespread deployment of this technology still faces many significant challenges. The key deployment challenges include how to use the simple, unreliable raw data generated by RFID deployments to make business decisions; and how to manage a large number of deployed RFID devices. In this thesis, a multi-agent based RFID middleware which addresses some of the RFID data and device management challenges was developed. The middleware developed abstracts the auto-identification applications from physical RFID device specific details and provides necessary services such as device management, data cleaning, event generation, query capabilities and event persistence. The use of software agent technology offers a more scalable and distributed system architecture for the proposed middleware. As part of a multi-agent system, application-independent domain ontology for RFID devices was developed. This ontology can be used or extended in any application interested with RFID domain ontology. In order to address the event processing tasks within the proposed middleware system, a temporal-based RFID data model which considers both applications’ temporal and spatial granules in the data model itself for efficient event processing was developed. The developed data model extends the conventional Entity-Relationship constructs by adding a time attribute to the model. By maintaining the history of events and state changes, the data model captures the fundamental RFID application logic within the data model. Hence, this new data model supports efficient generation of application level events, updating, querying and analysis of both recent and historical events. As part of the RFID middleware, an adaptive sliding-window based data cleaning scheme for reducing missed readings from RFID data streams (called WSTD) was also developed. The WSTD scheme models the unreliability of the RFID readings by viewing RFID streams as a statistical sample of tags in the physical world, and exploits techniques grounded in sampling theory to drive its cleaning processes. The WSTD scheme is capable of efficiently coping with both environmental variations and tag dynamics by automatically and continuously adapting its cleaning window size, based on observed readings.