Electrical students benefit from alumnus’ generosity

MOTIVATED BY A PASSION to give something back to upcoming generations of students, Soh Mntambo, Electrical Engineering alumnus, recently visited his alma mater to share his 13 years of industry experience and knowledge with Process Instrumentation IV undergraduate students.

Soh is currently employed as an Industrial Networking Engineer at ifm – South Africa. ifm is an international German company that specialises mainly in the automation industry. In the course of his career, he has also worked at companies such as Siemens, Festo and ABB. Soh, with the help of his former lecturer, Dr Nico Steyn, senior lecturer at the Department and lecturer for the Process Instrumentation IV B Tech students and the Department of Electrical Engineering (DEE), initiated an actuator sensor interface (ASinterface technologies) workshop for 24 B Tech students over two Saturdays. Students were given first-hand exposure to the practical AS-Interface industrial network solution that is used in programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and distributed control systems (DCSs).
It is designed for connecting field input/output (I/O) devices in discrete manufacturing and process applications, using single twoconductor cables. AS-Interface is a networking alternative to the hard wiring of field devices. It can be used as a partner network for higher-level fieldbus networks, such as Profibus, Interbus and Industrial Ethernet, for which it offers a low-cost remote I/O solution.

With this real hands-on exposure to a remote I/O solution, students quickly gained valuable skills that are essential in the ever-growing automation industry. When these students enter the workplace, and also if they are already employed, they could apply these skills to industrial sensor and actuator network designs, fault-finding and maintenance. The course is the same AS-Interface course that industry attendees are exposed to during training. The attendees received an attendance certificate endorsing that a professional expert and a leading company in the field of industrial networks presented the workshop.