Likhona Wolsak and Kyle Jansen, two Proteus Technical High School Grade 11 learners, recently won a Civil Technology construction competition sponsored by a Danish company.
Oswald Leander an educator at Proteus encouraged the learners to participate in a provincial competition initiated by the Denmark Education Department to design a wood-ash-clay brick out of sawdust, foundry ash, lime, building sand, and cement.
The two will now depart for Denmark on October 28 to present their concept at the Unesco Global Goal Eleven youth camp from October 30 to November 3 in Copenhagen, Denmark.
The product had to be designed with polluting materials and so take these materials out of the environment, as well as be cost-effective, durable, sturdy, and sustainable said Leander.
While researching, the learners discovered different materials used by a local manufacturing company. Atlantis Foundries spends thousands every year to safely and legally dispose of a by-product called foundry ash. The two decided to use it in their project.
They used sawdust as they believe that wood takes carbon from the environment and produces oxygen, but when wood ends up in the environment, it begins to rot and then releases the trapped carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. “This gives us reason to believe that if we use sawdust in our brick, we will be able to capture the carbon in the cement and thus take pollutants from the environment,” explained Wolsak and Jansen.
After the brick was produced, the learners tested their new product against existing brick products and discovered that it competed very well against them and in some cases outperformed them. The learners also discovered that you can easily hammer nails into their brick – as with a wooden board and the nail did not bend or split. Wood screws were used to screw into the brick without using fuse plugs to hold it in place.
It has been tested under fire conditions and it has also been discovered that it withstands fire conditions for half an hour very well.
The production of this new timber-ash-crete brick product makes Proteus Technical High School the outright winner of the completion.
The learners believe that this new brick will change the construction industry in the coming years.
“It is sometimes difficult to provide consistent quality teaching with 1 700 learners and overcrowded classes, but we constantly try our best to change learners’ attitudes toward their work and show them that nothing is impossible,” said principal Hilton Smith.
“It shows the hard work that teachers do behind the scenes after regular school hours to continue to expose learners to other levels,” added Smith.
A proud Smith noted that Proteus can compete with other schools and institutes at all levels by educating about the positive aspects of Atlantis.
