Presenting a Two-way Grid for Assessment of Quality Assurance in Higher Education

The literature in education is replete with instances of poor standards at the various levels of education in the Nigerian experience, and indeed in the other developing economies.  But the literature is almost mute about instances of search for lines of empirical evidence which could converge to attest to poor educational standards.  A problem identified in this study is lack of instruments for procuring such empirical evidence.   This problem is addressed in part by providing a two-way grid for assessment of quality assurance in higher education.  It is recommended that psychometric integrity of this instrument be investigated by further studies. Keywords: Higher education, quality assurance, qualitative education

Shunt compensation and optimization of Nigerian 330Kv 34 bus power system using metaphorless Rao-Type algorithms

Power system networks suffer from power losses and bus voltage violations due to heavy loading at the various buses. As a consequence, there is a need for some sort of compensation at the heavily loaded bus points. In this paper, a novel type of optimizer with fast convergence and simplicity called Rao-1, which is based on metaphorless programming, is presented for the task of optimization with shunt compensation on Nigerian 330-kV power network. The application of this algorithm for optimal shunt compensation of the Nigerian 330kV, 34-bus power transmission network is presented. The results obtained by Rao-1 technique are compared with particle swarm optimization (PSO). The findings show that using shunt compensation generally improves the precision of objective function values even though at some trials there might be deviations. Comparative results also show the competitiveness and efficacy of proposed Rao-1 type algorithm in terms of fitness scores and computational run time

Design Analysis of Microcontroler Based Automatic Power Management in Photovoltaic Systems

This work considered the design analysis of an energy management system to control the state of battery discharge of a solar power system without any form of load discrimination, thus preventing a sudden system shut down. The state of discharge of the storage battery is monitored by the voltage level sensor. In particular, four voltage levels were used in this work namely: 11.5V (for less critical), 11.0V, 10.5V and 10.0V (for most critical load). The outputs of the sensors are then connected to a microcontroller which is programmed to isolate the loads in the order of priority. Tests result showed that at different voltage levels, specific load was disconnected from the desired voltage thus, stored energy was efficiently conserved. Accordingly, this prototype design ensures efficient energy management in photovoltaic systems