Reimagined Intercultural Land Use: Assessment in Dorchester, Massachusetts’ Cultural Neighborhood

The significance of land use policy entails the key areas of land use planning, infrastructure development, and urban sprawl. Situated in a densely populated area with a large waterfront, the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts is a community with immense potential to revolutionize the urban landscape. The artistic movements from cultural influences within the city are growing which shows clear benefits to increased placemaking through community events. Artistic works are a tool for engaged advocacy for social justice in both informal and formal settings. This project proposes a series of three sustainable art digital projects that will illuminate land justice issues. Using the art projects as a model, four interviews were conducted with leaders at community organizations who work in the Dorchester and Greater Boston area. The interviewees gave feedback that demonstrated positive comments, concerns, along with land use creative ideas for future redevelopment. The interview led to ideas on how this project could potentially adapt to fit the technological era with social justice advocacy. As a guide for future land use policy investigations this project could bring a spotlight on redevelopment of land infrastructure. Further research could involve gathering feedback from diverse creatives who represent marginalized cultures before implementing the model

Female Students of Color in Higher Education

This participatory social justice focused project used both qualitative and quantitative approaches to examine our understanding of who we are individually, groups, and as citizens; nationally and globally, and how one’s identity will continue to evolve and change over a life time. We looked at self-claim identity, social imposed identity, and societal categorizing processes of identity such as one’s geographical, ethnic, or national connection. Participants engaged in detailed discussion on the constructed racial designations to different groups, the inter-sectional simultaneity by which people may experience their identities, and explored to understand the language that groups prefer to use to self-name their claiming identities and other terms used to describe group identity such as : advantaged, privilege, and dominant to describe groups with access to social power, disadvantaged, marginalized, and sub-ordinated for groups who are blocked from access to social power. The overall result of the workshop contents was positive. The common themes from the qualitative analysis of participants’ feedback were that they can see how developing one’s identity is a positive. The result of this project supported that human’s identity development is crucial to personal advancement and through the navigation of one’s social responsibility in the world around them. An understanding of self and the complexity of self-identity is important for one to stay focused on personal goals without living under the shadow of others’ expectations of success

Load-based Exergetic Assessment of an Offshore Thermal Power Plant in an Equatorial Environment

The Load-based exergetic assessment of a thermal power plant for offshore utilization was carried out. The gas turbine systems were split into sub-systems and simplified into control volume to show inflow and outflow of exergy at different loading. The operating parameters of the plant were monitored for 12 months through human machine interface (HMI), and the data collected were used with thermodynamic relations to carry out the assessment.  MATLAB 7.3 ® Software was used to evaluate the various model equations and results tabulated. The results show that for every 1% drop in the operational load, the thermal efficiency and exergy efficiency drop by 0.17% and 0.25% respectively. It further shows that there is about 0.006% decrease in fuel consumption under the same conditions, and at 44% loading the system has the highest percentage of exergy loss of about 21.3%. This means that as the operational load decrease, the percentage exergy loss increase proportionally. Enormous exergy is lost in the exhaust system due to absence of heat recovery steam generator. The assessment established that the components of the power plant degrade in the quality of exergy and performance at different loading of the plant due to mechanical loss and irreversibility

Dynamic corrosion risk-based integrity assessment of marine and offshore systems

Corrosion poses a serious integrity threat to marine and offshore systems. This critical issue leads to high rate of offshore systems degradation, failure, and associated risks. The microbiologically influenced corrosion (microbial corrosion), which is a type of corrosion mechanism, presents inherent complexity due to interactions among influential factors and the bacteria. The stochastic nature of the vital operating parameters and the unstable microbial metabolism affect the prediction of microbial corrosion induced failure and the systems’ integrity management strategy. The unstable and dynamic characteristics of the corrosion induced risk factors need to be captured for a robust integrity management strategy for corroding marine and offshore systems. This thesis proposes dynamic methodology for risk-based integrity assessment of microbially influenced corroding marine and offshore systems. Firstly, a novel probabilistic network based structure is presented to capture the non-linear interactions among the monitoring operating parameters and the bacteria (e.g., sulfate-reducing bacteria) for the microbial corrosion rate predictions. A Markovian stochastic formulation is developed for the corroding offshore system failure probability prediction using the degradation rate as the transition intensity. The analysis results show that the non-linear interactions among the microbial corrosion influential parameters increase the corrosion rate and decrease the corroding system's failure time. Secondly, a dynamic model is introduced to evaluate the offshore system's operational safety under microbial corrosion induced multiple defect interactions. An effective Bayesian network - Markovian mixture structure is integrated with the Monte Carlo algorithm to forecast the effects of defects interactions and the corrosion response parameters’ variability on offshore system survivability under multispecies biofilm architecture. The results reveal the impact of defects interaction on the system's survivability profile under different operational scenarios and suggest the critical intervention time based on the corrosivity index to prevent total failure of the offshore system. Finally, a probabilistic investigation is carried out to determine the parametric interdependencies' effects on the corroding system reliability using a Copula-based Monte Carlo algorithm. The model simultaneously captures the failure modes and the non-linear correlation effects on the offshore system reliability under multispecies biofilm structure. The research outputs suggest a realistic reliability-based integrity management strategy that is consistent with industry best practices. Furthermore, a dynamic risk-based assessment framework is developed considering the evolving characteristics of the influential microbial corrosion factors. A novel dynamic Bayesian network structure is developed to capture the corrosion's evolving stochastic process and the importance of input parameters based on their temporal interrelationship. The associated loss scenarios due to microbial corrosion induced failures are modeled using a loss aggregation technique. A subsea pipeline is used to demonstrate the model performance. The proposed integrated model provides a risk-based prognostic tool to aid engineers and integrity managers for making effective safety and risk strategies. This work explores the microbial corrosion induced failure mechanisms and develops dynamic risk-based tools under different operational scenarios for systems’ integrity management in the marine and offshore oil and gas industries

A framework to establish passengers' satisfactory key indicators and index in speed boat ferry service operations

This study provides a framework to holistically assess the level of passengers' satisfaction for a given ferry service based on the dominant Design/Operational, Passengers Care/Safety/Security and Environmental categorical factors that define the ferry service operations and influence passengers' satisfaction. A test case carried out for a ferry service offered by a boat operator in the Warri wharf yields a Passengers' Satisfaction Index of 3.84, indicating that the ferry service is in the range of dissatisfactory and moderately satisfactory, which is in good agreement with popular opinions that the service offered by that operator does not satisfy most of the passengers' expectations. The results of the test case proved that the framework reliably and realistically predicts the level of satisfaction the passengers derived from the various segments that define the service offered by a boat operator. This study will assist passengers make informed decision about the choice of operators to patronize. It will also guide operators and regulators to identify and improve those areas of the ferry service that are pertinent to the successful operation of the ferry business

Performance and Economic Analysis of Gas Turbine Subsystems for Power Generation in the Niger Delta

Abstract: In this research work, performance and economic analysis of three units' gas turbine plants in the Niger Delta, Nigeria has been carried out for the period of 18 months. The aim of this study is to assess the energy, exergy and economic behavior of the plants' subsystems. The methodology adopted was the splitting of the system into control volumes to show the inflow and outflow of energy and exergy at different operating conditions. A parametric study was also conducted to evaluate the influence of key decision variables like the load on the plant's subsystem performance. The analysis was done in MATLAB 7.3 ® environment and the results reveals that between the 40%-86% loading of the plant, the energy loss was optimum due to outages and exhaust gas energy waste, with revenue worth of $14,611,642 cumulatively, while the irreversibility in the exhaust gas progressively increase as the load increases with an exergy destruction cost rate of$234.98 per hour per unit. The combustor shows maximum exergy loss at 44% load with an exergy destruction cost rate of $127.87 per hour per unit, while the power turbine highest exergy destruction cost rate occurred at 73% load. These key performance indicators provide relevant information on the technical state of the plant for decision-making

Integrating safety management systems in hydrogen production facilities

This paper explores integrating a comprehensive safety management system into hydrogen production facilities, emphasizing the critical importance of safety given the associated risks, including high pressures, flammability, and potential for leaks. A robust chemical safety management system (CSMS) tool is introduced, which is designed to significantly enhance safety protocols by providing structured frameworks for hazard identification, real-time onitoring, predictive analytics, and regulatory compliance tracking. Quantitative analyses conducted at actual hydrogen facilities demonstrate a 60 % reduction in safety incidents, a 16.7 % improvement in regulatory compliance scores, and a 42.5 % enhancement in operational response efficiency following CSMS implementation. This paper establishes the superiority and critical improvements provided by integrating this advanced CSMS through detailed case studies, real-world applications, and comparative analysis. The results underscore the tangible benefits, including improved incident management, reduced operational risks, and more substantial alignment with national and international safety standards, highlighting the system's essential role in sustainable hydrogen production

Comparative modeling of hull form resistance for three ocean going vessels using methodical series

This paper presents a comparative estimation of the hull form resistance for Cargo ship, Ocean-going Tug and Container ship. The research study evaluates the influences of various ship hull parameters in relations to the vessel speeds and level of turbulence (Reynolds number). The modeling was done using MATLAB software and the model test technique based on the ITTC, ATTC, Granville and Hughes friction line application. The result shows that the hull form resistances follow the same trend in the ITTC, ATTC and Granville models, while the Hughes model gave a different trend with other techniques. It further revealed that as the speed increases by 10knots, the frictional resistance coefficients decrease by 11.86% for the ITTC &amp; Granville models, and 12.03% for the Hughes model. For Ocean-going Tug and Container Ship, the frictional resistance coefficient decrease by 12.31% for the ITTC &amp; Granville models, and 12.14% for the Hughes model. The Reynolds number increase by 62.52% for every 10knots increase in the speed of the Cargo ship and 62.23% for every 10knots increase in the speed of the Ocean going tug and Containership. At various experimental speeds, the results showed that for every 1 knots increase in the speed of the Containership, the effective power developed increases by 9.45%. This provides a technical and analytical guide on hull form resistance trend for engineers and ship operators.</jats:p