Stef Coetzee

Member of the Mining Electrical design team, working on multi-disciplinary mine-hoist projects.

Responsibilities range from control system design to PLC and HMI software development, as well as the application of functional safety principles and procedures to mine-hoist machinery.

Development, manufacture, and operation of software and hardware systems.

Key contributions include software systems design and development for reliable and efficient data processing, and business management.

Software tools and technologies used: Python (leveraging packages such as FastAPI, Polars, etc.), MySQL, JavaScript with React, Google Cloud Platform, Git.

Early development of Zimplats Furnace 2 PLC system on the Schneider Control Expert platform.

Software team member of the furnace control system upgrade project at Polokwane Metallurgical Complex (part of the Anglo American Platinum fleet), using Siemens PCS 7. Includes operation of cooling-water supply pump motors driven by ABB VFDs.

Technologies control and automation team member of the Zimplats Furnace 2 project, platinum smelter scope. Responsible for control and automation deliverables, including deliverables developed in Siemens COMOS.

Control and automation team member on the Northam Platinum project, a US$60 million detail design and commissioning project in Limpopo, South Africa. Activities and responsibilities included:

• ABB Freelance distributed control system software development and implementation, including use of Danfoss VFDs as fan motor soft starters;
• Smelter furnace instrumentation installation and commissioning on an expedited schedule.

Control and automation team member for the Iron Bridge project, a US$2.6 billion, 20Mtpa magnetiteprocessing facility in Western Australia. Using T-SQL and VBA:

• Saved hundreds of hours of review and rework by developing diagnostics and progress-tracking tooling for the project control and automation digital twin; and
• Developed a bulk equipment-tag generator to automatically produce electrical and instrumentation termination tags, removing the need for error-prone manual entry by designers and engineers.

Awarded an Innovation Scholarship by South Africa’s National Research Foundation for research into the use of model predictive control to reduce a given residence’s dependency on the national electrical grid.

Thesis permalink http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/105979