Prof Johan van der Spuy and Dr Thomas Meyer (PhD student 2021) recently attended the ASME TurboEXPO 2022 in Rotterdam, Netherlands. During the conference, Prof van der Spuy presented three papers and a tutorial session on behalf of his students (Mr Francois Boshoff, Chaz Fenner and Martin Strümpher) and a number of other co-authors (Prof Meyer, Dr Pretorius). A fourth paper by Prof Ryno Laubscher was presented on-line.

The ASME TurboEXPO Conference is the world’s largest turbomachinery conference, with more than a thousand paper delivered at the conference every year. This year was the first year since 2019 where the conference was presented as an in-person event. Attendees made full use of the opportunity to pick up on old relationships and the evenings between conference days were spent discussing issues ranging from hydrogen combustion to electric-powered flight right down to the quality of Dutch beer.

The Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering Department at Stellenbosch is one of the founding members of the Fans and Blowers Committee at the conference. Members from the Department have been actively involved with the committee as reviewers and session, vanguard and committee chairs. This year the committee was able to present five paper sessions and two tutorial sessions at the conference.

At the conference, Dr Meyer (along with co-authors Profs Alessandro Corsini, Chris Meyer and Johan van der Spuy) received the best paper award from the Fan and Blowers Committee for his paper titled “Optimisation of a tip appendage for the control of tip leakage vortices in axial flow fans”. The photo shows Dr Meyer receiving his award from Prof Giovanni Delibra, the current chair of the Fans and Blowers committee.

Credit: Prof Johan van der Spuy