Efficiency Increase and Fuel Save Benefits of Combined Cycle Operation (Garri Power Plant as a Case Study)

Thermal power plants’ overall efficiency increase, and fuel consumption decrease draw worldwide researcher’s attention due to the limited resources and high cost of fossil fuel. Considering Al-Jaily power plant, the so-called Garri power plants 1 and 2 in Sudan as the case study, this paper compares overall plant efficiency and fuel save with the combined cycle and open cycle operation in which both plants could run. Evaluation of plant’s efficiency is based on the first law of thermodynamics. The results reveal advantage of the combined cycle operation mode in terms of efficiency increase, and on the other hand, in terms of fuel consumption decrease with the same amount of energy produced

Investigation on Reasons of Delay on Construction Projects in Khartoum State

The purpose of this study is to investigate and analyze the reasons of construction project delays in Khartoum State, Sudan, as well as the negative consequences of these delays and how to mitigate them. A questionnaire with 96 companies active in the construction industry was created for this objective the SPSS application was used to examine the data. The analysis concluded that the most significant causes of delay were contractors' financial difficulties, suppliers' or subcontractors' late payments, poor site management and supervision. The most serious consequences of the delay were time and expense overruns. Competent project managers, awarding bids to the right/experienced consultant and contractor, and proper project planning and scheduling were found to be the most effective methods for reducing construction delays. The paper offered multiple recommendations and solutions that serve as a guide for the project's various partners in order to ensure successful project management

Rainfall Study Using Geographic Information Systems

Rainfall has many effects, including, for example, but not limited to, its impact on agriculture, where many countries depend their economy on agriculture, and therefore the amount of rainwater and its management play a direct role in the economy. Also, the lack of study and effective management of rainfall by competent authorities leads to a lot of human and material disasters. This paper was conducted to study rainfall using Geographical information systems (GIS) technology and thus enable effective management and prediction of the rainfall amount. Rainfall data were obtained for 41 years from 1981 to 2021 for 18 stations in the Republic of Sudan, and then within the ArcGIS 10.8 program, the stations were created and the study was conducted on them using the geostatistical analyst toolbar. A histogram was obtained that shows the frequency of values and detailed information about them. Also, a trend analysis was conducted and it became clear that the rainfall increases the more we head south and east. Rainfall prediction maps were generated using the inverse distance weighting, local polynomial interpolation, and kriging method. Finally, a detailed study was conducted on the Khartoum station by creating a graph that shows the variation in rainfall over the 12 months for the 41-year

Applying ArcGIS ModelBuilder to Determination the Suitable Sites for Establishing Basic Schools (Case Study: Eastern Unit - Port Sudan City)

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) play an effective role in societal development, including supporting and developing the educational process with essential capabilities characterized by effectiveness, speed, and ease, which help support decision-making. The educational sector in the Eastern Unit - Port Sudan City suffers from randomness and poverty of equitable spatial distribution, therefore, this study was carried out to determine the appropriate sites for establishing new basic schools according to the recommended criteria, consequently, a model was created using model-builder tools and the spatial analyst tools were taken advantage in GIS. The criteria used in the study were obtained from the General Administration of Planning - Ministry of Urban Planning - State of Khartoum - Sudan and a satellite image of the study area was acquired and stratified into several layers that meet the objective and a lot of work was done in the ArcGIS 10.3 program until the best sites were found, and the final best site for a new basic school was determined from them. This shows the effectiveness of the program used in accurately determining the best sites according to international and local standards, which are difficult to access without the help of ArcGIS ModelBuilder, and thus benefit from it in serving the community by equitable distribution of basic schools and the possibility of all students to enroll in them

Study of Influencing Factors on The Site Productivity of Construction Projects in Khartoum State

Our current era is an age of competition and development in various fields, the most important of which is the field of industries, which is one of the important criteria for measuring the development of any society, there are many types of industries including the construction industry. The construction process is a creative process that uses six main sources and creates a unique origin. These elements are materials, machinery, labor, engineering technology, finance, and, construction management, despite the important role of construction projects in our country, they are exposed during various stages to several problems in order to achievetheirs objectives, the most important of which is low on the site productivity in construction projects There are certainly reasons for the decline, and it also has risks and negative effects on the feasibility of the project. This research aims to study the factors affecting on the site productivity of construction projects in Khartoum State by focusing on the concept of productivity and its importance and methods of measurement, as well as the most important factors affecting them, in order to achieve this goal, it was necessary to adopt a special approach, where was designed questionnaire and interviews to examine these factors plaguing the construction sites, the results of the questionnaire showed that the percentage of establishments operating in the construction industry that train workers represents 30%, and that establishments operating in the construction industry that do not have a specific methodology for training workers are estimated at 60%, and the results of the analysis showed that the most important factors affecting on-site productivity related with workers in construction sites, such as the physical and moral incentives, the use of Modern technology, lack of training institutions for employees and the application of quality system. Based on these results, the proposed solutions were developed to improve the current situation, the need to develop human resources and create an appropriate work environment and review wage formats and methods of motivation and the use of modern technologies

The Impact of Architectural Design on the Thermal Performance of Low-Income Housing in a Hot and Dry Climate

One of the concerns of an architect must be to overcome the harsh climatic conditions and turn them into internal needs suitable for life and work without entailing unjustified costs in cooling the building. One of the most important objectives of the study is to know the building design impact on the natural cooling process of low-income housing to create a thermally comfortable indoor environment in the region of a hot, dry climate. Khartoum city was chosen as a study area, because of the spread of such buildings in it, and the climatic conditions were chosen during the 8-10 days of May 1998. As the highest days on which temperatures have been recorded. The thermal analogy was performed using the computer program HTB2 (is an international computer software specialized in simulating the thermal performance of buildings and studies related to energy consumption in them, and also works to provide scientists, programmers, researchers, and designers with flexible means of detailing the study of how the building works with heat and energy in the short term) for a simple residential building that is widespread among low-income people, the thermal simulation is performed for the selected design before and after the manipulation of the locations of some internal functional spaces aiming to deduce the effect of changing the design on the temperature. The study's findings indicated that linear design arrangement leads to poor internal thermal performance, compared with the staggered arrangement when build forms shade each other. Also, the path-way (corridor) is good for continuous air movement and ventilation but leads to the poor thermal performance of internal space

Predictive analytics of Churn Customers Calling Details Records using Classification by Clustering (CBC) dealing with Supervised Machine Learning Algorithms

Telecom companies generate enormous amounts of data regularly. The telecom Decision makers that obtaining new customers is more challenging than sustaining existing ones. Furthermore, data from existing churn customers may be utilized to detect churn clients and their patterns of behavior. This research develops a model of churn prediction for the telecommunication business, which uses NB, SVM, DT, and RDF to detect churn clients. The proposed model churns customers' data using classification techniques, with the Random Forest (RDF) method performing well (95.94 % correctly categorized instances), the Decision Tree (DTs) providing classification accuracy (95.40 %), the Naïve Bayes (NB) provided classification accuracy (89.58 %), and the Support Vector Machine (SVMs) provided classification accuracy (71.08 %). The four different classification algorithms' predictions and observations are compared, with a percentage of 71 percent equality and 29 percent variation

Non-isothermal crystallization kinetics and its effect on the mechanical properties of carbon fiber/polyphenylene sulfide composites

The degree of crystallization of semi-crystalline thermoplastics is an important factor in determining the final properties of the structure of composite materials. This article studied the non-isothermal crystallization kinetics of carbon fiber (CF) reinforced polyphenylene sulfide (PPS) composites by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) with various cooling rates from 10 k/min to 70 k/min. The MoZhiShen method was applied to the analysis of the nonisothermal crystallization of the composites. Moreover, the effects of the crystallization behavior of CF/PPS composites on their mechanical properties were also investigated. It was found that the MoZhiShen method can effectively be applied to study the nonisothermal crystallization kinetics of CF/PPS composites. The result indicated that the crystallization peak gradually became strengthened in intensity, and crystallization decreased with increasing the cooling rate. Moreover, the increase in the cooling rate during composite fabrication was found to decrease the flexural properties of the composite, but the energy absorption and the impact strength were significantly increased by 15.1%

The effect of using recycled aggregates on reinforced concrete columns exposed to an axial compressive force

At present, the need for reusing destroyed concrete products and construction wastes WHICH resulted from demolitions or wars and natural disasters has emerged because of the increase in storing cost of these wastes and also the depletion of natural building materials over time, coarse aggregate (gravel) particularly. In this research, an experimental study was conducted on /14/ reinforced concrete columns exposed to a compressive axial force, column dimensions are (250 x 250 x 1000) mm, the parameters in this research are the reinforcement ratios (1%, 1.62%) and the replacing ratios of natural coarse aggregate NA by recycled concrete coarse aggregate RA as following (0%, 10%, 20%, 30%, 40%, 50%, 60%), The values of the maximum axial load on compression for columns were measured experimentally and compared with the mathematical values according to some international codes and the Syrian Arab Code. Also, The effect of changing replacing ratios of recycled aggregate was tested on the Characteristics of concrete mixtures (Compressive strength, Splitting Strength, Tensile Strength in bending), The results showed that the water absorption ratio of recycled aggregate is higher than natural aggregate, which requires adding extra amounts of water to concrete mixtures to conserve their workability and this leads to a reduction in the resulted concrete compressive strengths, and this study shows that concrete compressive strength decreasing value reached almost around 19.8% at age 28 days for replacing ratio 60% and this value can be acceptable to use these mixtures in reinforcement concrete according to Syria Arab Code, Also the concrete compressive strength increased by 9.32% at the replacing ratio 10%, the maximum axial load on compression decreased by 6% at replacing ratios smaller or equal to 40% while the decreasing reached about 15.7% for the replacing ratio 60%

Analysis of Irrigation Water Requirements in Gezira Scheme Using Geographic Information Systems: Case Study Block Number 26 (Dolga)

Water scarcity has a direct impact on food security and a real threat to food production for millions of the population. To avoid the unwise and random consumption of available water resources, it is high time for using efficient system and appropriate policies for management of irrigated farms to control water overuse, starting by the analysis of the existing reality. Block number 26 (Dolga) in Gezira scheme had been chosen as a study area. The total area of the study area is about 24616 Feddans. The study aims to apply GIS in the data editing, manipulation, storage, processing, and presentation for the analysis of irrigation water requirements. GIS had been chosen for its capabilities of data capturing, data processing and efficient spatial analysis. Layers of geo-referenced spatial database including crops’ maps, irrigation canals network and its command area, each crop water requirements, irrigation water requirement, rainfall data, area cultivated for each crop and contour map of the study area had been created and used for the spatial analysis in ArcGIS software. Five course rotations are applied for the crops of cotton, wheat, sorghum, and groundnut. Each crop covers 20% of the total area and the remaining 20% are fallow and layer for each crop had been created. Crops’ water requirements had been calculated applying Penman-Monteith method and saved in the attributes Table of crops layer. It had been found that the seasonal crop water requirements per Feddan for each crop is 3,871.56 m3, 2,983.26 m3, 1,847.16 m3 and 2,007.6 m3 respectively, calculated using Penman-Monteith method. The total crops water requirements are 50,254,962.66m3(absorbed by plants), water allotment of the study area according to the ratio of the area is 67, 195,230.327 m3, irrigation water requirement is 64,537,716.5 m3 (including the water losses), where the actual water supply is 63,817,600 m3 which had been calculated applying ArcGIS tools and saved in the attribute Table of the crops and rotation layer. The study had concluded that cotton consumes the largest amount of water supply, rainfall water is in irrigation has the used only in the complementary irrigation of sorghum crop and the implementation of GIS capabilities enables efficient analysis and scheduling of irrigation water