Novel Controls of Photovoltaic (PV) Solar Farms

Solar Farms are absolutely idle in the night and even during daytime operate below capacity in early mornings and late afternoons. Thus, the entire expensive asset of solar farms remains highly unutilized. This thesis presents novel technologies for utilization of PV solar farm inverter in nighttime for providing multiple benefits to power systems, as well as accomplishing the same objectives during the daytime from the inverter capacity left after production of real power. The new technology transforms a solar farm inverter functionally into a dynamic reactive power compensator known as STATCOM, and termed PV-STATCOM. A novel coordinated control of PV-STATCOMs is proposed for loss reduction in a distribution network. The saved energy is substantial and can be used for powering several homes annually. The second novel PV-STATCOM control involves a temporary curtailment of real power production and utilization of the available reactive power capacity to prevent the instability of a critical induction motor load. The third novel PVSTATCOM control is employed to significantly enhance the power transfer limit of a long transmission line both in the nighttime and also during daytime even when the solar farm is producing a large amount of real power. A new technique for short circuit current management is developed for a conventional PV solar farm that can potentially solve the problem due to which several solar farms have been denied connectivity in Ontario. This thesis has contributed to two patent applications and presented first time implementations of another two filed patents. A generalized PV solar system model in EMTDC/PSCAD software has been developed and validated with manufacturer\u27s datasheet. Another contribution of this thesis is the first time harmonics impact study of the largest solar farm in Canada, in the distribution utility network of Bluewater Power, in Sarnia, Ontario. This thesis makes a strong case for relaxing the present grid codes to allow solar farms to exercise these novel controls. This technology can open up new avenues for solar farms to earn revenues apart from the sale of real power. This will require appropriate agreements between the regulators, network utilities, solar farm developers and inverter manufacturers

Microfluidics and Bio-MEMS for Next Generation Healthcare.

Ph.D. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 2018

Identification of Novel CYP2E1 Inhibitor to Investigate Cellular and Exosomal CYP2E1-Mediated Toxicity

Cytochrome P450 2E1 (CYP2E1)-mediated hepatic and extra-hepatic toxicity is of significant clinical importance. Diallyl sulfide (DAS) has been shown to prevent xenobiotics such as alcohol- (ALC/ETH), acetaminophen- (APAP) induced toxicity and disease (e.g. HIV-1) pathogenesis. DAS imparts its beneficial effect by inhibiting CYP2E1-mediated metabolism of xenobiotics, especially at high concentration. However, DAS also causes toxicity at relatively high dosages and with long exposure times. The objective of the first project was to find potent DAS analogs which can replace DAS as a research tool or as potential adjuvant therapy in CYP2E1-mediated pathologies

Women's employment in garment factories in Bangladesh : emancipation or exploitation?

Women's participation in export-oriented industries has been one of the most dominant features in many developing countries since the 1970s. Employment in waged jobs has often been viewed as a means of women's integration into development processes. Research showed that development efforts in Third World countries negatively affected women and displaced them from their productive activities. As such, there was an increasing demand from liberal feminists and women development practitioners to integrate women into development processes through employment generation. They stressed the need for women's access to resources as the way to emancipate them from subordination. Although generation of employment through the establishment of export-oriented industries has given women access to economic resources, their participation in waged labour has given rise to a persistent debate in literature in relation to the issue of their emancipation/exploitation. This ethnographic research examines the implications of waged employment for women participating in export-oriented garment factories in Bangladesh.Within a feminist and broader social science research methodology, this study employs both qualitative and quantitative research approaches and analyses the experiences of women as factory workers, as members of the household and as members of society actively involved in day-to-day interactions with other societal members. The findings of this study reveal that the implications of waged employment for Bangladeshi women are complex and contradictory. Analysis of women's perceptions as factory workers shows that they are exploited on the factory floor in different ways and experience new forms of patriarchal domination beyond their family. Exploration of their perceptions as household members shows that earnings improve their position within the family. Although they often do not control their wages and frequently bear the double burden of productive and reproductive activities, they enjoy autonomy and freedom from familial patriarchal domination to a certain degree. In addition, women's participation in the labour market and their constant presence in the male dominated spaces are incessantly contesting the traditional notions of gender practices and meanings in Bangladeshi society. This situation also influences women to challenge male authority to an extent. Even though the challenges are not widespread, these may create new possibilities for women in society

Employee Perception towards Effective Training Program: A Study on Some Selective Private Commercial Banks

In an era of uncertain and highly competitive business environments business leaders believe that the level of knowledge and skill of the existing human capital are more strategically critical than ever before. The sustainability of a business is highly dependent on the process of how the workforce is informed and trained with state-of-the-art knowledge, skills and how their attitudes are being groomed in order to maintain sensitivity towards the environmental changes. In this research it has been alleged that Private Commercial Banks (PCBs) in Bangladesh are not out of the frame of this scenario. The role of PCBs is critically appraised in the economic development and trade proliferation. The aim of this paper is to unearth how the existing training and management development program is perceived by employees. In this research, employees from five (5) selective banks in the private sector out of 47 scheduled commercial banks in Bangladesh have been chosen based on convenience as a sample. Five point likert scales have been designed to assess agreeableness and hypotheses have been formulated as well as a Z-test used in order to grab sample populations’ valid judgment towards the management development program of the PCBs in Bangladesh. This research has found that even if banks arrange an adequate number of training programs and allocate time for the purpose of updated Knowledge, Skills and Attitude (KSA), the majority of the respondents believe that they are failing to contribute due return to their organisation due to faulty training and management development systems. Key Words: private commercial Banks (PCBs), Training and Management Development program, Knowledge, Skills and Attitude (KSA), effective training, employees’ perceptio

Attribute framing effects on the timing of booking intentions

Based on experimental evidence, this paper intended to shed some light on whether the negative and positive framing (wording) manipulation of a tourism offer affects the  travellers’ judgment of the decisions involved in booking a holiday element(i.e., mountains tour) with regard to timing (well before the trip, at the last minute). We employ Levin et al’s attribute framing paradigm to manipulate a key attribute of a holiday offer (good/bad weather conditions on the day of a mountains tour), and ask consumers to evaluate the offer and make a mountains tour reservation decision. As hypothesized, positive presentation of the attribute information elicited more responses in favour of early booking and negative presentation of the same attribute elicited fewer responses in favour of early booking; and therefore this could form a useful basis for marketing communication strategies related to the timing and presentation of booking information to the advantage of the tourism industry. Key words: Prospect theory, attribute framing, weather conditions, experiment, timing of booking intention

Development of scaling criteria and numerical simulation study of steam flooding process

Canada contains reserves of oil sand and heavy oil resources considered to be the largest amount of unconventional hydrocarbons deposited in unfavorable conditions. It needs more efforts and technological advancement to recover oil from such reserves. Steam flooding enhanced oil recovery technique is applied for more than 70% of heavy oil reservoirs to extract the oil. Threedimensional (3D) displacement model can represent an appropriate approach and model for the steam flooding process. However, their physical limitations make it impossible to duplicate the real behavior of a reservoir in larger scale. So, it is important to develop scaling criteria for depicting the actual fluid behavior for unconventional reservoirs. Scaled physical models have the unique advantage of capturing all physical phenomena occurring in a particular process by transforming the parameters into dimensionless numbers. This concept is applicable to fluid flow through porous media, where continuous alteration of rock and fluid properties can be characterized by various dimensionless numbers. In this study a set of dimensionless groups were developed using both inspectional and dimensional analyses. The new groups of dimensionless numbers can be used to characterize the reservoir rock and fluid properties for better explanation of complex rock/fluid phenomena for the steam flooding process. It should be noted that the complete set of scaling criteria is very difficult to satisfy. Therefore, some of the similarity groups must be relaxed in order to satisfy the most important parameters of the specific reservoir activities. The choice of which requirements to relax depends on the particular process being modeled. Scaling of the phenomena considered to be least important to a particular process might be relaxed without significantly affecting the major features of the process. The choice of an approach depends on the importance of the phenomena that are not scaled by that approach. Major scaling groups were found by applying different elimination techniques. The effect of those dominant dimensionless groups on recovery was evaluated through the study of process controlling parameters. A new group which is called Dykstra-Parsons coefficient is introduced to incorporate the reservoir heterogeneity. A combined dimensionless group was proposed to characterize and evaluate the performance and found to have the largest effect on oil recovery. Sensitivity analysis of scaling numbers is performed to find out the relative effect of each dimensionless numbers on oil recovery. Finally, a numerical simulation study is performed to quantify the effect of steam quality and permeability variations for different reservoirs. This research work leads to the development of a procedure that can be applied to design a steam flooding EOR process. This process allows the assessment of different parameters to aid in the selection of optimum additive concentration to account for the uncertainties due to reservoir heterogeneity. The process is flexible; it can be applied to wide range of reservoir types as there exists a physical commonality between laboratory and field scale