ABSTRACT The ever increasing world energy demand, with over dependency on fossil fuel is hampered by adverse environmental effects due to global warming resulting from carbon dioxide emitted during combustion. Majority of Kenyans rely on biomass, whose sustainability is faced with diminishing forest cover, currently at 1.7 %. Hence, there is need to search for alternative environmentally friendly and accessible sources. Availability of mango seed and cashew nut shells, currently considered of...
ABSTRACT A framework for condition monitoring approach that uses the sense of smell was investigated to diagnose the faults of plug-not-firing, loss of compression and carburetor faults from the exhaust fumes of gasoline fuelled automobile engine. An electronic nose based condition monitoring hardware and software was developed using the framework to obtain smell prints that correspond to normal operating conditions and various induced abnormal operating conditions. Fuzzy C-means and K means ...
Abstract The Design of an Efficient Solid Waste Management and Disposal Scheduling System in a metropolis is hereby presented. The design employed ten landfill sites in contrast to the existing one landfill site in the metropolis. The metropolis was divided into ten zones and a Hungarian mathematical model was used to get the optimal assignment of the proposed landfill sites to the zones. This model was applied to the field data obtained from the road net-work of Enugu metropolis and Enugu S...
ABSTRACT This study is about the production and characterization of epoxy-rice husk ash composite. Composites were produced at 10%,20%,30%,40% and 50% volume fraction of Rice Husk Ash(RHA) fillers and the epoxy was cast neat at 0%RHA which served as the control .The microstructure of the composites were studied with Scanning Electron Microscopy(SEM) and Energy Dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy(EDX).Mechanical properties of the composites such as tensile properties(tensile stress, tensile strain,...
Abstract: This study investigates the Indoor Air Quality (lAQ) of a room apartment and focused on the number of occupants that a space or an apartment can accommodate as a result of increase in the concentration level of the CO2 contaminant present within the space. The law of mass action was applied to generate a relation between the concentration of CO2 produced and the concentration of the reactants (i.e., O2 and CO). A decay equation was also used to relate the variation in the number of...
ABSTRACT This work deals with the multi-faceted impact of gas flaring on a global scale and the different approach employed by researchers to measure gas flared and its resulting emissions. It gives an overview of methods employed by these researchers in the oil and gas industry, academia and governments in attempt to determine ways of measuring and reducing gas flaring and its emission drastically. This approach so far includes analytical studies, numerical studies, modeling, computer simul...
ABSTRACT Biometrics is a physical, electronic and biological means of providing dependable and accurate identification of people. It entails data acquisition, storage and subsequent matching at points of access or identification. Biometrics is an emerging technology that identifies people by their physical and/or behavioral characteristics and practically requires the person to be identified to be physically present at the point of identification. In this thesis, efforts to improve biometric...
ABSTRACT This study was conducted using both field experiments and structured questionnaires to investigate the influence of hand transmitted mechanical vibrations and shocks experienced by operators from handles of a single-axle tractor and determine an optimum operator‟s daily exposure limits in field conditions. The field experiments were conducted at Kilimanjaro Agricultural Training Centre (KATC). Four different makes of single-axle tractors were studied, namely: AMEC S 1100A2 (distri...
ABSTRACT Condition monitoring of Electrical power equipment has attracted considerable attention for years. The aim of this work is to use Fuzzy logic (FL) Tool Box in building a simulation system that will diagnose all kinds of incipient faults, phase to phase fault and overloading in a transformer and monitor its conditions. Current and rate of change of current with time have been identified as the input variables, duly represented in the programme as “Error” and “Error-Dot”. ...
ABSTRACT In the recent time, the use of low cost biosorbents like bacteria, fungi, algae and some agricultural by-products have been investigated for their biosorption capacities. In this work, the biosorptions of three heavy metals (zinc, copper and manganese) from aqueous wastewater solution by five micro-organisms (Bacillus circulans, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Staphylococcus xylosus, Streptomyces rimosus and Saccharomyces sp.(Yeast) were investigated using a combined flow and batch process...
ABSTRACT The design of an irrigation canal is intended to ensure that water is conveyed with minimal erosion and sedimentation. The underground canal in Southwest Kano Irrigation scheme was designed to meet these conditions but over time it has been silted up to the extent that its conveyance capacity has significantly dropped. The sediment control structure at the inlet can only prevent bedload, consisting of large sediments, from entering the canal but cannot prevent entry of fine suspende...
ABSTRACT Drought is acritical stochastic natural disaster that adversely affects water resources, ecosystems and people. Drought is a condition characterized by scarcity of precipitation and/or water quantity that negatively affects the global, regional and local land-scales. At both global and regional scales, drought frequency and severity have been increasing leading to direct and indirect decline in water resources. For instance, increase in drought severity and frequency in the upper Ta...
ABSTRACT In Nigeria, a satisfactory degree of reliability has not been attained in our power systems in recent times. The average duration of interruptions that customers experience is quite high and the degree varies from place to place. This is evident all around the nation, most especially in urban commercial cities. Previous researchers have focused on the assessment of power system reliability indices using different models. In this work, a computationally efficient modified linear con...
ABSTRACT The assumed deflection shapes used in the approximate methods such asin the Rayleigh–Ritz method were normally formulated by inspection andsometimes by trial and error, until recently, when a systematic method ofconstructing such a function in the form of characteristic orthogonal polynomials(COPs) was developed in 1985. However, vibrational analyses of plates with all edges free or clamped are much more complicated. This project aims at establishing particular expressions for the...
Abstract The electric vehicle relies on electric motors for propulsion. In this report, the case was made for the induction motor as a suitable candidate for this tractive application. Being able to control the electric motor invariably implies efficient control of the vehicle. This work reports the six-step operation of the constant volts/hertz (V/f) control technique for voltage fed induction motor drives. Mathematical equations supporting the principle is discussed and the drive is m...