Post-harvest losses in developing countries have contributed to the unavailability of foodstuff. Estimation of these losses is generally cited to be of the order of 4% but under very adverse conditions, it is estimated as high as 100%. A significant percentage of these losses are related to improper and/or untimely preservation of foodstuffs. This research work is therefore aimed at developing a multipurpose solar dryer. The solar dryer consists mainly of solar collector and dryer chamber com...
This paper is focused on the performance analysis of locally design plastic crushing machine for domestic and industrial use in Nigeria. A plastic crushing machine designed and fabricated from locally sourced materials were used to crushed plastic materials mainly to reduced plastic wastes dumped across Nigeria cities. Performance analysis was carried out on the plastic crushing machine and the efficiency was calculated as 85.16% while the average machine through put capacity was determined a...
The objective of the experiment was to understand the practical application of strain gauge rosette and to determine principal strains and their direction using Mohr circle. Elastic constants of the specimen were evaluated using the values obtained from the experiment. The constants gotten from the experiment were compared with the standard elastic constants for steel. The comparison showed that the elastic constants evaluated from the experiment were very close to the standard ones. The smal...
The evaluation of cow dung and talinum triangulare (water leaf) as a seeding agent for the production of biogas from organic domestic wastes was conducted in Warri metropolis, Nigeria. The experiments were conducted within a period of thirty seven days in a steel bio-digester. The biogas produced was dried, purified and transferred into a commercially available 7.5Kg gas cylinder using a compressor. The results obtained showed that the domestic wastes seeded with cow-dung and talinum triangul...
At present, the main conventional source of energy used all over the world is the fossil fuels which are non-renewable and hence their deposits will eventually be exhausted. Wood is one of the oldest fuel sources known to man. Research have shown that about 80 million cubic metres, equivalent to 43.4 x 109 kg (or 43.4 million tonnes) of fuel wood with an average daily consumption ranging from 0.5- 1.0 kg of dry fuel wood per person is being consumed in the country annually for cooking and oth...
Cassava peeling remains the only unsuccessfully mechanized process which has constituted a global challenge to the cassava food industries. A major constraint in existing cassava peeling machine is the poor quality of finished products obtained, coupled with poor efficiency of the technologies. This research work is focused on the design and development of an improved continuous cassava peeling machine. The machine frame work is rectangular in shape measuring 2700mm in length by 1200mm in wid...
Crushing of farm produce for easy storage and consumption is still a problem in most rural areas in Nigeria. Large tons of food crops are lost annually in Nigeria as a result of unavailability of storage facilities. This necessitated the design of a multi-purpose crusher to save crushing energy with minimal grain losses, being the primary aim of this study. The major components of the designed crushing machine consists of a hopper, crushing chamber, shaft, hammers, screen, bearings, discharge...
This work is aim at the design and development of a low cost groundnut decorticating machine for home and commercial use in Nigeria.4.36Kg of roasted groundnut was fed into the machine; this produces an average mass of 3.43Kg of peeled roasted groundnut seeds, 0.462Kg of unpeeled groundnut seeds,0.399Kg of partially peeled groundnut seed and 0.07Kg of broken groundnut seed. An average time of 488.8seconds and an average peeling efficiency of 78.46% was recorded. It was observed that the highe...
In this paper, traditional method of pounding yam with mortar and pestle was compared to yam pounding machine. Random yam selection was done from a mix of new and old yam. Cooking time, temperature and pounding time were all recorded. The machine consists of a metallic casing with an electric motor sitting on a suspended floor base and connected via a pulley to a shaft and blade. A unique modification to the concept is its water heating and cooking ability by the inclusion of a heater coi...
Abstract: In this study, a miniature fluidised bed boiler for steam generation was designed and constructed. The boiler ismade up of a steam drum, combustion chamber, downcomer and riser tubes as a heat exchanger, a non-return valve andsuperheater tube. Experimental investigation on the fuel distribution was carried in two-dimensional chamber with crosssection of 500 mm x 1000 mm and bed height of 77 mm, 47 mm and 27 mm. The results obtained from the performanceevaluation of the fluidised bed...
Abstract. The importance of brake systems in automobiles cannot be overemphasized. Brakes are used in speed control of vehicles and do so by the conversion of kinetic energy into thermal energy. Better stopping performance has favored the disc brake system over the drum brake system and has found wide application in high-performance vehicles. Brake fade, caused by thermal overload has placed a limit on the permissible temperature at which braking systems can function, and it is the task of de...
Consider a steel-rust-concrete composite consisting of a circular cylindrical concrete cover and a coaxial uniformly corroding steel reinforcement. Prediction of the amount of rust penetrated into the microcracks of concrete cover from a set of data measured at the surface of the concrete is of particular interest. The steel is assumed to be linear isotropic and rust follows a power law stress–strain relation. For the concrete, anisotropic behavior and post-cracking softening model is emplo...
The capabilities of the proposed nonlocal beam models in the companion paper in capturing the critical velocity of a moving nanoparticle as well as the dynamic response of double-walled carbon nanotubes (DWCNTs) under a moving nanoparticle are scrutinized in some detail. The role of the small-scale effect parameter, slenderness of DWCNTs and velocity of the moving nanoparticle on dynamic deflections and nonlocal bending moments of the innermost and outermost tubes as well as their maximum val...
The current work suggests mathematical models for the vibration of double-walled carbon nanotubes (DWCNTs) subjected to a moving nanoparticle by using nonlocal classical and shear deformable beam theories. The van der Waals interaction forces between atoms of the innermost and outermost tubes are modeled by an elastic layer. The equations of motion are derived for the nonlocal double body Euler–Bernoulli, Timoshenko and higher-order beams connected by a flexible layer under excitation of a ...
The free longitudinal vibration of tapered nanowires is investigated in the context of nonlocal continuum theory. The problem is studied for the nanowires with linearly varied radii under fixed–fixed and fixed–free boundary conditions. In order to assess the problem in a more general form, a perturbation technique is proposed based on the Fredholm alternative theorem. The natural frequencies, corresponding mode shapes, and phase velocities of the tapered nanowires are derived analytically...