Design and construction of forced/natural convection solar vegetable dryer with heat storage

Gutti Babagana, Kiman Silas and Mustafa B.G.

This paper presents the design and construction of forced/natural convection solar vegetable dryer for food preservation. With the use of local materials, the system was constructed. The temperatures of 53, 52, 52, 44 and 36 ⁰C were reached at the collector unit, inlet, energy storage unit, air outlet and ambient temperature respectively. When using the forced mode system, the drying time of tomato, onion, pepper, okra and spinach were 14, 15, 12, 11 and 1 hr (s) while the drying rate were 0.20, 0.020, 0.21, 0.22 and 0.77 kg/h respectively. when using the natural mode system, the drying time of tomato, onion, pepper and spinach were 24, 27, 25, 21 and 2 hrs while the drying rate were 0.12, 0.08, 0.09, 0.11 and 0.39 kg/h respectively. The collector efficiency was 45% and the useful heat of 48.9 W/m²K was used for about six hours in drying during the night.

Pressure and pressure derivative analysis for a three-region composite reservoir

Freddy-Humberto Escobar, Javier-Andrés Martinez and Luis-Fernando Bonilla

In recent years, the constant increase in oil prices and declining reserves of conventional crude has changed the exploitation of deposits that were economically unattractive to be produced as an alternative way to keep the world’s oil supply. Heavy oil deposits are mainly characterized by having high resistance to flow (high viscosity), which makes then difficult to produce. Since oil viscosity is a property that is reduced by increasing the temperature, thermal recovery techniques, such as steam injection or in-situ combustion, have been converted over the years into the main tool for tertiary recovery of heavy oil. Usually, well tests from enhanced oil recovery projects, such as steam injection, in-situ combustion, and CO2 flooding projects, are analyzed using a radial, two-region composite reservoir model. However, a three-region model may be more appropriate in many cases since a transition zone may be developed. In this work, the use of an existing analytical solution for the transient pressure response of a well in a radial, three-region reservoir is applied to develop a methodology utilizing a pressure and pressure derivative plot is developed for three-region composite reservoirs so that mobilities and the distance to the radial discontinues are estimated. The methodology was successfully verified by its application to synthetic examples.

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Inwheel SRM design with high average torque and low torque ripple

G. Nalina shini and V. Kamaraj

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Switched reluctance motors are widely used in various applications due to its inherent simplicity, robustness, and fault tolerance. The design of outer rotor type (inwheel) Switched Reluctance Motor plays a vital role in Electric vehicle. In SRM, the values of Stator pole arc and rotor pole arc has greater impact on average torque and torque ripple. This paper deals with the multiobjective optimization of stator pole arc and rotor pole arc to obtain correct compromise between maximum average torque and minimum torque ripple. The optimization procedure is done on 6/8, 5HP, 1500 rpm SRM. The optimized stator pole arc and rotor pole arc are used to model the machine analytically. The results are validated by Finite element analysis Software Package MagNet7.1.1. The proposed method holds good for the Optimum SRM design for electric Vehicles.

Decoupling control of a reactive distillation process using tyreus-luyben technique

Abdulwahab GIWA and Süleyman Karacan

This work has been carried out to demonstrate the application of Tyreus-Luyben PI and PID methods in the decoupling temperature control of a reactive distillation process using the production of ethyl acetate and water (by-product) from the esterification reaction between acetic acid and ethanol as the case study. For comparison purposes, Ziegler-Nichols PI control method was also simulated. The process model, from which the decoupling matrix was estimated, was developed with the aid of System Identification Toolbox of MATLAB using the experimental data generated from the reactive packed distillation column set up. The developed decoupling control was simulated for set-point tracking using MATLAB/Simulink. The top segment temperature, the reaction segment temperature and the bottom segment temperature were selected as the controlled variables while the reflux ratio, the feed ratio and the reboiler duty were respectively chosen as the manipulated variables. The good responses with low oscillations obtained from the simulations of the decoupling control of the process using Tyreus-Luyben PI and PID control methods have shown that the control of the reactive distillation process has been achieved successfully with each of these methods and that the developed control system using these methods can thus be applied to the real process. In addition, due to its lowest values of IAE and ISE, Tyreus-Luyben PID method has been found to be the best one among the methods that were studied.

Fuzzy adaptive pi controller for single input single output non-linear system

A. Ganesh Ram and S. Abraham Lincoln

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The proposed fuzzy adaptive PI control algorithm is designed for non-linear level process to improve the control performance better then the conventional PI controller. The conventional PI controller works well only if the mathematical model of the system could be computed. Hence it is difficult to implement the conventional PI controller for variable as well as complicated systems. But fuzzy logic control does not require any precise mathematical model and works good for complex applications also. In this paper, a two input and two output fuzzy adapting PI controller is designed to control the chosen non-linear level process.

Evaluation of Parambikulam aliyar basin in two decades using GIS and remote sensing

R. Rani and K. Elangovan

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Evaluation of any irrigation project involves the assessment of area improved by the project. In this paper an attempt has been made to find out the change in the land use and land cover of the Parambikulam Aliyar basin in India where Parambikulam Aliyar Project, an interstate Project interlinking of 8 reservoirs in 3 sub basins was implemented. In this paper change detection is identified by analyzing the satellite imageries between two decades i.e., 1990 and 2011. Remote sensing, Geographical Information System (GIS) and Global Positioning System (GPS) were used to assess the changes in the land-use pattern and the changes in the agriculture command area due to the implementation of the Parambikulam Aliyar Project. Digital image processing of the Landsat Thematic mapper image (24th January 1990) and IRS-1C LISS-III image (6^th February 2011) and Survey of India toposheets (1972) were used to derive the land-use pattern and classified images were analysed using GIS for detection of changes. The results indicated that agriculture area was increased (8.29%) from 65000ha to 85018ha and forest plantations were increased (2.68%) from 26253ha to 32737ha during 1990-2011. The area under current fallow category reduced (8.62%) from 80778ha to 59960ha in the same period. The area under current fallow is high i.e., 59961ha because the image was taken during non cropping period of Aliyar sub basin of PAP. The reserve forest area was reduced up to 2.76% i.e., from 62868ha to 55194ha. The result shows the improvement in the agriculture area of this basin.

Renormalization of QCD using modified pre-regularization method and β-function

Shafiul Alam Tarafder and M. A. Mansur Chowdhury

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In an earlier paper we have prescribed a modified form of pre-regularization and used this prescription to study the renormalization of QED and Yang-Mills theory. We have seen that this is one of the best prescriptions in studying the quantum field theory problems. In this paper we have applied this prescription in studying the renormalization of QCD and also found the corresponding β-function. Here also we obtained the same result as found by other regularization prescriptions.

Fininte element analysis of flexible pavements strengthed with geogrid

Adel A. Al-Azzawi

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The axisymmetric finite element simulations through ANSYS software are carried out to evaluate the benefits of using geogrid in flexible pavements. This paper describes the behavior of asphalt concrete (AC) pavement under axisymmetric conditions and subjected to static loading. The results of flexible pavements improvement using geogrid are presented. Analytical results for four different most possibilities of geogrid reinforcement in the paved road layers have been evaluated. The optimum position was decided based upon the predicated tension and compressive stress reduction and, deformation reduce rate. Four types of reinforcing model and one type of unreinforced model of paved road were selected. The results showed that a higher tension stress absorption when the geogrid is placed between the base course layer and subbase layer in the selected model.

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Effect of initial temperature on burning velocity of methanol and ethanol - air mixtures

Arkan F. Said

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The optical technique has been used to determine the effect of initial temperature on laminar flame speed of Methanol, Ethanol - Air premixed mixtures experimentally inside a tube. the flame front position had been located by a photocell. The laminar flame speed measured at a laboratory conditions for a wide range of equivalence ratios. All experimental work was carried out at constant pressure (Pre-Pressure period), in order to use density ratio method for the calculation of laminar burning velocity. The flame temperature has been calculated theoretically. Mixture strength and unburned mixture temperature dependence of burning velocity is represented by empirical function over the ranges f = 0.7-1.4, Tu = 300 K-373 K at pressure of (1 atm). In overlapping ranges, the results agree well with those previously published.

Pressure and pressure analysis for double-permeability systems without type-curve matching

Freddy Humberto Escobar, James Vega and Maiver Ramiro Diaz

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Often, double-porosity models have been widely used for characterization of naturally fractured reservoirs. However, there is a need of using more complex mathematical models such as double-permeability to better describe fractured reservoirs. It has been noticed that the behavior of such reservoirs do not have the classical unit-slope during the transition period in double-porosity systems and the homogeneous behavior is also different since the second radial flow regime has a lower value as the matrix permeability contributes to the flow capacity. In this work, a model previously presented in the literature is used to understand the pressure and pressure derivative behavior of double-permeability systems with the purpose of developing a practical and easy methodology for their characterization which was successfully tested and verified with synthetic cases.

A. Purna Chandra Rao, Y.P. Obulesh and Ch. Sai Babu

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On partly censored data with the weibull distribution

Chris Bambey Guure and Noor Akma Ibrahim

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Having been observed as one of the most useful distributions for modelling and analysing lifetime data in medical, biological, engineering and others, the Weibull distribution has been studied vigorously in the literature to determine the best method in estimating its parameters. The objective of our study is to determine the reliable estimator among three methods for estimating the parameters of Weibull distribution and how Bias the estimators’ estimates of the parameters are to the true values. The methods being examined here are maximum likelihood estimator, least square estimators of Y on X and X on Y. The methods are compared using MSE and Bias base on simulation study. From the study it is observed that least square on X is more reliable for estimating the shape parameter with relatively small samples but with larger samples LSY will be the preferred method whiles maximum likelihood is reliable for estimating the scale parameter.

A novel method for mining video association rules using weighted temporal tree

V. Vijayakumar and R. Nedunchezhian

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With the ever-growing digital libraries and video databases, it is increasingly important to understand and mine the knowledge from video database automatically. Video association mining is a relatively new and emerging research trend used to discover and describe interesting patterns in video. The traditional classical association rule mining algorithms can not apply directly to the video. It differs in two ways such as, spatial and temporal properties of the video and significance of the video sequence items. Most of the video association rules mining algorithms discover frequent item sets considers only temporal properties that do not consider the quantity in which items have been appeared in the video sequence. This paper discusses an efficient method for discovering a weighted temporal association rules from a large volumes of video sequence data in a single scan of the database using Weighted Temporal Tree structure. Video association rule consists two key phases are (i) Video pre-processing and (ii) Video association rule mining. The pre-processing phase converts the original video sequence into a temporal video transaction format. The mining phase consists three tasks namely, weighted temporal tree construction, frequent pattern extraction and rule mining. The proposed weighted temporal tree based association rule mining did not require multiple scans. The mined association rules have more practical significance and identifies the valuable rules comparing with Weighted Tree based algorithm. We also presented results of applying these algorithms to a synthetic data set, which show the effectiveness of our algorithm.

The effect of decahydronaphthalin on the mechanical properties of montmorillonite reinforced polypropylene nanocomposites

A. Yaya, D. Dodoo-Arhin, J.K Efavi and D. S Konadu

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The exceptional property exhibited by nanoparticles such as carbon nanotubes and silicate layers has been the major drive for research into advanced nanocomposites. The solution method is used to prepare polypropylene/clay nanocomposites with loadings of 2% and 5%. Decahydronaphthalin was used to disperse the clay and dissolution of the polypropylene matrix. The intercalation of macromolecular chains into the organoclay was evident from XRD and confirmed by SEM studies. Decahydronaphthalin was observed to have a considerable effect on the polymer matrix properties and the tensile moduli of the nanocomposites compared to the pristine polypropylene. Tensile moduli of nanocomposite treated with decahydronaphthalin have been observed to be lower than those of pristine polypropylene. The moduli of both the 2% and 5% PP/clay nanocomposite was 528 MPa and 547 MPa respectively. The pristine PP had a modulus of 794 MPa and that of the PP dissolved in decahydronaphthalin alone was found to be 639 MPa.

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