INTRODUCTION The objective of this work is first to determine experimentally the horizontal and vertical force components of the operative forces during soil cutting. Since previous work in soil cutting had been empirical and involved curve fitting techniques therefore the second objective is to predict these horizontal and vertical force components. In order to achieve these objectives a special apparatus was designed and fabricated for experimentation. It comprises the soil bin, the horizon...
ABSTRACT The march of globalization and international trade has brought into focus the need for the measurement of quality as an essential element for customer satisfaction. Earlier approaches to quality control based mainly on end product testing are no longer considered adequate enough as quality must now be assured at every developmental or production stage to guarantee quality product at the end. Thus, non-subjective and non-destructive methods are receiving attention especially where the...
Abstract The GSM Based Water Distribution Monitoring and Control System improves the water distribution by providing the automation of water levels in the tanks and monitoring and control of water flow in the distribution network. Water sensor detects the water level in the tanks and then sends signal to the microcontroller unit for actuation of valve and pump. The water monitoring system can detect leakages in the distribution pipeline. If a leakage occurs, an upstream solenoid valve autom...
ABSTRACT High concentrations of methylene blue (MB) in aqueous environments have detrimental effects to both plants and animals and hence its removal is very important. Metal-Organic Framework, HKUST-1 and composite, CuO@HKUST-1, were synthesized and characterised for their functional groups before and after degradation of methylene blue. Studies were done to optimize the degradation of methylene blue and to characterize the degradation system with respect to photocatalytic degradation kinet...
ABSTRACT The investigation of nitrate adsorption onto Brachystegia spiciformis leaf powder from waste waters was performed. Characterization for the functional groups of the biomass before and after nitrate sorption as well as after desorption was done using an FTIR spectrophotometer. The effect of pH, contact time, dosage and initial nitrate concentration was investigated. The Brachystegia spiciformis leaf powder had amine, carboxylic and hydroxyl groups that were involved in nitrate remova...
ABSTRACT The activity of indigenous microbial system is a required tool to remediate an environment that has been contaminated by hydrocarbons. This work deals with the dynamic response to crude oil contaminants of undefined microbial systems in three selected communities of the Rivers State of Nigeria. The activities of indigenous (undefined) consortia were studied and compared using Respiratory technique. The soil samples were incubated with 2 % ( 𝑣⁄𝑣)crude oil in mineral salt medi...
ABSTRACT People living in rural areas need broadband connection for services such as e-governance, virtual class rooms, telemedicine, video-on-demand, home entertainment. Therefore, the need for high speed broadband connection in rural areas is inevitable. However, in order to provide broadband services, service providers must incur high deployment cost and wait for a long time for return on investments. Long Term Evolution (LTE) has been proposed to overcome high deployment cost, although ...
Abstract This article proposes a conceptual framework that used mini-gird business models (MBMs) to rank electricity tariff plans. The framework combines intuitionistic fuzzy set (IFS), Criteria Importance Through Inter-criteria Correlation (CRITIC), fuzzy axiomatic design (FAD) and Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). It considered when decision-makers specify or did not specify for MBM’s requirements. Also, this article considered uncertainty in decisi...
A distribution network connected to rural consumers is often quite weak due to the long distance. Hence, an increase in power demand over this network will result to power quality problems. The main cause of this unacceptable situation is the inability of the power system to meet the demand of reactive power. Inductive loads are the main cause of power quality problems and they are widely used in domestic and industrial sector, contributing to inefficient use of energy. In this paper, a react...
The evaluation of power flow in the distribution network has many techniques but there has been a very much interest in the traditionally known methods. These methods have enjoyed very wide acceptability and applicability. However, a comparative study of these techniques for the investigation of the load flow analysis for any of the Nigeria’s distribution systems is not adequately and proficiently documented. Thus, this inspired the adaptation of these techniques for the solution of a struc...
ABSTRACT In the developing nations that are located in the tropical region; there is a growing trend of fire incidence in buildings without adequate development of fire prevention and/or reduction protocol. Thus, this study addresses the growth and spread of fire in multi-storey buildings. The rooms are structured as cells in order to reduce the flame spread from a single fuel item, by heat release, to other neighbouring items or rooms (otherwise known as cells). The philosophy is to reduce ...
ABSTRACT Due to the increase in electricity demand, transmission sector has become overstressed since it can only be built at vast cost. In many developing economies, the network is highly susceptible to outages, collapse as well as partial or total failures, since the existing transmission capacity limit is often closely approached. To overcome this challenge better transmission expansion needs to be considered. This paper identified the implementation of transmission expansion with a numbe...
Abstract The grid fragility is a prevalent challenge in Nigeria electricity supply industry (NESI). It has resulted in recorded incidents of voltage collapse which have been on the increase in the recent time. Meanwhile to evaluate this events; thus the nexus between voltage collapse and network capacity was explored. To actualize this, the load flow analysis was carried out on the Nigeria-31 bus system with the aid of the Newton-Raphson iteration technique. Using the relevant parameters (su...
ABSTRACT Lightning phenomenon has resulted into several losses to both supply-side and load-side of the electricity infrastructure. Quite a handful of research has investigated strategies for its mitigation. This work is an application of the Fernandez-Diaz arrester model to the section of Eko Distribution network. The procedure involves simulation of the network in respect of the influence of the surges and surge arresters using MATLAB/SIMULINK. The study reveals that whenever lightning str...
ABSTRACT The poor investment in the network expansion programme has led to high level of grid fragility experienced in the power transmission system in Nigeria. Thus, any little disturbance often results in cascaded outage which is very hazardous to the power system equipment and operation. In order to overcome or ameliorate the influence of this challenge, the network engineers have to devise methodologies based on the dynamic stability analysis. This motivates the development of power syst...