Low-level jet height’s impact on wind turbine loads: A case study

Over the years, wind turbines have been steadily increasing in size, with newer models boasting larger dimensions. For instance, the diameter of an installed prototype offshore wind turbine in late 2022 was over 200 m, which is significantly larger than in 2010, where the average size was 90 m. This results in new interactions between the wind turbine and the atmosphere in the form of Low-Level Jets (LLJs). The thesis aims to study the effect of a LLJ on the wind-induced response of a 15 MW offshore wind turbine. Engineering tools, i.e. TurbSim and OpenFAST, were used to simulate the turbulence boxes and the load response of a large offshore floating turbine. The results showed that the interaction between the LLJ profiles and the wind turbine response is not trivial, and the development of the loads as the LLJ height increases can’t be described by one single pattern. They were however closely related to the aerodynamic loads.Masteroppgave i energiENERGI399MAMN-ENER

Capability Development among the Ultra-poor in Bangladesh: A Case Study

Microcredit is advocated as a development tool that has the potential to reduce poverty, empower participants, and improve health. Results of several studies have shown that the extreme poor, or the ultra-poor, often are unable to benefit from traditional microcredit programmes and can, as a result of taking a loan they cannot repay, sink deeper into economic and social poverty. This case study describes an intervention directed at enabling the ultra-poor rural populations to pull themselves out of poverty. The intervention integrates multiple components, including asset grants for income generation, skills training, a time-bound monthly stipend for subsistence, social development and mobilization of local elite, and health support. Results of an evaluation showed that, after 18 months, the programme positively impacted livelihood, economic, social and health status to the extent that 63% of households (n=5,000) maintained asset growth and joined (or intended to join) a regular microcredit programme. Impacts included improved income, improved food security, and improved health knowledge and behaviour. Applying a social exclusion framework to the intervention helps identify the different dynamic forces that can exclude or include the ultra-poor in Bangladesh in development interventions such as microcredit

Availability and Rational Use of Drugs in Primary Healthcare Facilities Following the National Drug Policy of 1982: Is Bangladesh on Right Track?

In Bangladesh, the National Drug Policy (NDP) 1982 was instrumental in improving the supply of essential drugs of quality at an affordable price, especially in the early years. However, over time, evidence showed that the situation deteriorated in terms of both availability of essential drugs and their rational use. The study examined the current status of the outcome of the NDP objectives in terms of the availability and rational use of drugs in the primary healthcare (PHC) facilities in Bangladesh, including affordability by consumers. The study covered a random sample (n=30) of rural Upazila Health Complexes (UHCs) and a convenient sample (n=20) of urban clinics (UCs) in the Dhaka metropolitan area. Observations on prescribing and dispensing practices were made, and exit-interviews with patients and their attendants, and a mini-market survey were conducted to collect data on the core drug-use indicators of the World Health Organization from the health facilities. The findings revealed that the availability of essential drugs for common illnesses was poor, varying from 6% in the UHCs to 15% in the UCs. The number of drugs dispensed out of the total number of drugs prescribed was higher in the UHCs (76%) than in the UCs (44%). The dispensed drugs were not labelled properly, although >70% of patients/care-givers (n=1,496) reported to have understood the dosage schedule. The copy of the list of essential drugs was available in 55% and 47% of the UCs and UHCs respectively, with around two-thirds of the drugs being prescribed from the list. Polypharmacy was higher in the UCs (46%) than in the UHCs (33%). An antibiotic was prescribed in 44% of encounters (n=1,496), more frequently for fever (36-40%) and common cold (26-34%) than for lower respiratory tract infection, including pneumonia (10-20%). The prices of key essential drugs differed widely by brands (500% or more), seriously compromising the affordability of the poor people. Thus, the availability and rational use of drugs and the affordability of the poor people have remained to be achieved in Bangladesh even 27 years after approving the much-acclaimed NDP 1982

The Design, Analysis, & Application Of Multi-Modal Real-Time Embedded Systems

For many hand-held computing devices (e.g., smartphones), multiple operational modes are preferred because of their flexibility. In addition to their designated purposes, some of these devices provide a platform for different types of services, which include rendering of high-quality multimedia. Upon such devices, temporal isolation among co-executing applications is very important to ensure that each application receives an acceptable level of quality-of-service. In order to provide strong guarantees on services, multimedia applications and real-time control systems maintain timing constraints in the form of deadlines for recurring tasks. A flexible real-time multi-modal system will ideally provide system designers the option to change both resource-level modes and application-level modes. Existing schedulability analysis for a real-time multi-modal system (MMS) with software/hardware modes are computationally intractable. In addition, a fast schedulability analysis is desirable in a design-space exploration that determines the best parameters of a multi-modal system. The thesis of this dissertation is: The determination of resource parameters with guaranteed schedulability for real-time systems that may change computational requirements over time is expensive in terms of runtime. However, decoupling schedulability analysis from determining the minimum processing resource parameters of a real-time multi-modal system results in pseudo-polynomial complexity for the combined goals of determining MMS schedulability and optimal resource parameters. Effective schedulability analysis and optimized resource usages are essential for an MMS that may co-execute with other applications to reduce size and cost of an embedded system. Traditional real-time systems research has addressed the issue of schedulability under mode-changes and temporal isolation separately and independently. For instance, schedulability analysis of real-time multi-mode systems has commonly assumed that the system is executing upon a dedicated platform. On the other hand, research on temporal isolation in real-time scheduling has often assumed that the application and resource requirements of each subsystem are fixed during runtime. Only recently researchers have started to address the problem of guaranteeing hard deadlines of temporally-isolated subsystems for multi-modal systems. However, most of this research suffers two fundamental drawbacks: 1) full support for resource and application level mode-changes does not exist, and/or 2) determining schedulability for such systems has exponentialtime complexity. As a result, current literature cannot guarantee optimal resource usages for multi-modal systems. In this dissertation, we address the two fundamental drawbacks by providing a theoretical framework and associate tractable schedulability analysis for hard-real-time multi-modal subsystems. Then, by leveraging the schedulability analysis, we address the problem of optimizing a multi-modal system with respect to resource usages. To accelerate the schedulability analysis, we develop a parallel algorithm using message passing interface (MPI) to check the invariants of the schedulable real-time MMS. This parallel algorithm significantly improves the execution time for checking the schedulability (e.g., our parallel algorithm requires only approximately 45 minutes to analyze a 16-mode system upon 8 cores, whereas the analysis takes 9 hours when executed on a single core). However, even this reduction is still expensive for techniques such as design-space exploration (DSE) that repeatedly applies schedulability analysis to determine the optimal system resource parameters. Today\u27s massively parallel GPU platforms can be a cost-effective alternative for scaling the number of computer nodes and further reducing the computation time. An efficient GPU-based schedulability analysis can also be used online to reconfigure the system by re-evaluating schedulability if parameters change dynamically. In this dissertation, we also extend our parallel schedulability analysis algorithm for a GPU. Finally, we performed a case-study of radar-assisted cruise control system to show the usability of multi-modal system which consists of fixed priority non-preemptive tasks

Prospects and Problems of RMG Industry: A study on Bangladesh

The development of Garments Industry is considered as the priority area in the development policy in many countries, especially in Bangladesh. The young entrepreneurs are engaged in varied form of small and medium scale garments industry which comprises of products like shorts, trousers, shirts, sweaters, blouses, skirts, tea-shirts, jackets, sports attire and many more casual and fashion items with the changing times. This study is conducted to analyze the prospects, problems and solution of problems of Readymade Garments Industry in Bangladesh. The findings of this paper show that Bangladesh has a great opportunity to earn a great foreign currency through developing readymade garments industry. The study also suggests some measure for the removal of ongoing crisis of garment sectors. Keywords: Readymade garments, History, Trend, Infrastructural development

Temperature Impact and Efficiency Analysis of Hybrid PVT System

Hybrid photovoltaic thermal (PV/T) systems are a type of solar system that combines the functions of a photovoltaic and a solar thermal in one unit [1]. The PV panels generate electricity from sunlight, while the thermal collection system captures the excess heat produced by the PV panels and uses it to produce warm water or space heating [2]. According to the recent analysis, the efficiency of the solar energy production in particular solar photovoltaic system is still low [3]. There are several factors to be considered that affect the energy production during the operation of hybrid PVT system. There are several internal and external or environmental parameters are responsible for this output disruption. The parameters found to be affecting are solar irradiance, environmental and module surface temperature, humidity, wind speed, shading, dust and many others [3]. Solar irradiance and temperature are the key role-players among all the variables. The light intensity or solar irradiance value is related with PV production as it affects short circuit current of the absorbed photons in the semiconductor material. The most important parameter which is the main concern of this work is the inside and outside temperature of the panel. If there is rise in ambient temperature, then the short circuit current only increases that results in decrease in power output [3-4]. As a result, the maximum power point (MPP) also decreases with the rise of temperature. Temperature is considered as a negative parameter in the panel, but it turns into positive in the proper use of hybrid PVT system. In this work, the impact of temperature rises in the panel and its related power output is shown which clearly identifies the negative result on the panel. Additionally, the MPP output due to temperature rise is also explained in the figure. Afterall, the changes in efficiency due to the temperature rise also analyzed in this work. One of the main advantages of hybrid PVT system is that it helps to regulate the panel temperature that tends to improve its efficiency. The PVT system can keep the panels cooler with high efficiency by capturing and using the excess produced heat. Temperature can be regulated in a PVT panel using several methods which will improve overall efficiency. Thus how, the PVT panel will be cooled producing more electric energy including thermal energy. This work proves that the impact of temperature rise can be mitigated, and efficiency is improved using hybrid PVT system properly

Capability Development among the Ultra-poor in Bangladesh: A Case Study

Microcredit is advocated as a development tool that has the potential to reduce poverty, empower participants, and improve health. Results of several studies have shown that the extreme poor, or the ultra-poor, often are unable to benefit from traditional microcredit programmes and can, as a result of taking a loan they cannot repay, sink deeper into economic and social poverty. This case study describes an intervention directed at enabling the ultra-poor rural populations to pull themselves out of poverty. The intervention integrates multiple components, including asset grants for income generation, skills training, a time-bound monthly stipend for subsistence, social development and mobilization of local elite, and health support. Results of an evaluation showed that, after 18 months, the programme positively impacted livelihood, economic, social and health status to the extent that 63% of households (n=5,000) maintained asset growth and joined (or intended to join) a regular microcredit programme. Impacts included improved income, improved food security, and improved health knowledge and behaviour. Applying a social exclusion framework to the intervention helps identify the different dynamic forces that can exclude or include the ultrapoor in Bangladesh in development interventions such as microcredit

Intimate Partner Violence against Women: Experiences from a Woman-focused Development Programme in Matlab, Bangladesh

This paper explores the association between microcredit-based development programmes and domestic violence against women perpetrated by their husbands. A sub-set of cross-sectional data collected in 1999 from 60 BRAC-ICDDR,B study villages in Matlab, Bangladesh, was used. Data were analyzed to characterize group-level differences among study women regarding the reported occurrence of violence (physical and/or mental) and to identify its predictors. About 17.5% of women had experienced violence from their husbands in the past four months, the proportion being greater among BRAC house-holds (p=0.05). Results of logistic regression identified age, schooling, age of household head, and self-rated poverty status of household as important predictors of violence, but not level of BRAC member-ship. The study concludes that the greater level of domestic violence reported during the initial stages of BRAC membership subsided with the introduction of skill-development training among participant women over time