Investigative Study on the Use of De-Oiled Palm Kernel Cake for Biogas Production

Availability of Palm Kernel Cake (PKC) has increased due to the increase in the number of cottage oil palm processing industries in developing countries. A quest for clean energy from bio-waste is also on the increase. This study aims at investigating the biogas generating capacity of de-oiled PKC and its corresponding methane content. De-oiled PKC and a mixture of de-oiled PKC and fresh sugar cane chips were used as the two bio-feed samples in a laboratory anaerobic digestion set up. A theoretical approach was also used to determine the expected methane content in the biogas. Laboratory results for de-oiled PKC gave the volume by weight of bio-feed for biogas and methane to be 12.7 ml/g and 4.2 ml/g respectively and that of the combination of de-oiled PKC and fresh sugar cane chips to be 3.15 ml/g and 1.25 ml/g respectively. The measured methane composition for de-oiled PKC and that of the combination of de-oiled PKC and fresh sugar cane chips to be 33% and 40% respectively while the theoretical estimates were 33.5% and 41.1% respectively. The study shows that de-oiled palm kernel cake has biogas/methane generation potential whose quality can be improved by the addition of other biogas producing wastes.KEYWORDS: Biogas, Agro-Industrial Waste, Palm Kernel Cake, Anaerobic Digestion, Wastewater

Thermodynamics and adsorption isotherms for the biosorption of Cr(VI), Ni(II) and Cd(II) onto maize cob

The use of maize (Zea mays) cob for the biosorption of Cr(VI), Ni(II) and Cd(II) is reported. Biosorption experiments were carried out using batch process with 8g weight of adsorbent and variable adsorbate concentrations. Variations in the concentration of the different adsorbates during the adsorption process were monitored by the use of Shimadzu AA650 Double Beam Atomic Absorption/Flame spectrophotometer. Thermodynamic quantities such as ΔH and ΔS were determined in which ΔH varied from 1,271.21Jmol-1 to 1,466.59Jmol-1 at 20mg/L adsorbate concentration and 1,276.20 to 1,872.42Jmol-1 at 60mg/L suggesting increasing endothermicity of the adsorption process. The adsorption process was found to be spontaneous, with spontaneity increasing with increase in adsorbate concentration and temperature. Also, the ΔG values suggested high affinity of Cr over the other adsorbates. Equilibrium data were tested using Freundlich and Langmuir adsorption isotherms. The values of the numeric constants n and KF from Freundlich plots and the linearity of their plots suggested a chemisorption process closely defined by Freundlich isotherm.Keywords: Adsorbate, Adsorbent, Adsorption isotherms, Maize cob, Thermodynamic

Biosorption of Cr(VI), Ni(II) and Fe(II) by maize (zea mays) cob

The experimental results for the biosorption of Cr(VI), Ni(II) and Fe(II) onto maize cob were reported. The adsorbents efficiency on the bioremediation of these metals was estimated from the change in the percent adsorbate removal with (i) adsorbent dosage (ii) adsorbate initial concentration, (iii) variation in pH of the adsorbate solution and (vi) increase in surface area of the adsorbate. Untreated Maize Cob (MC) was found to demonstrate high affinity for Fe(II) in both granular and powdered form in such a way that 2g Powdered Maize Cob (PMC) was able to remove about 89% whereas a 100% removal was observed with 8g adsorbent. On the other hand MC showed low affinity for Ni(II) in the sense that even with the powdered form, % removal does not vary significantly between 2 and 8g.Keywords: Zea mays, adsorption, adsorbent, metal ion, % remova

Mathematical Characterization of Biological Control of Cassava Pests Model

Pests are major constraints to the effective growth and development of every crop through their damage, and can be controlled effectively by the use of their natural enemies which is referred to as the biological pest control. In this study, the biological control model of cassava pests through optimal control theory was presented in order to minimize the population of the pests and stabilize the natural enemies population so as not to affect the crop negatively. A mathematical model was formulated via the Lotka-Volterra model, and the model was characterized. The optimality system was established, the equilibrium point with its uniqueness was established for the model. Finally, stability analysis of the model was investigated through optimal control approach and numerical data were employed to validate the system. The results obtained showed that cassava pests can be effectively controlled biologically. Keywords: Optimal control, Cassava pest, Biological control, Stability, Natural enemie

Entrepreneurship Education as Panacea For Youth Unemployment: Implication Of Vocational Counselling For Sustainable National Development

One of the many pressing challenges facing Nigeria today is youth unemployment with the ripple effect of their resort to violent crimes. The concern of many educationists and the public in general is to encourage youths to engage in useful livelihood. This paper x-rayed the promotion of entrepreneurship education and vocational counselling in eradicating youth unemployment in the society. An attempt has been made to look at entrepreneurship education based on the goal of the newly introduced senior secondary education curriculum enriched with the aims and objectives of Vocational Counselling. It was concluded that guiding the young people to pursue the right type of entrepreneurship education through effective and continuous vocational counselling is a sure way of eradicating unemployment and will build a more prosperous and advanced country. Some recommendations towards improving entrepreneurship education were also made. Key words: Unemployment, Entrepreneurship Education, Vocational Counselling, Sustainable Developmen

Automating consumer's connections to the distribution network for enhanced performance

Abstract:Trial and error approach which involves service interruption is usually carried out to resolve unbalance on phases in power distribution system. This approach might improve the phase voltage and current but the resultant effect (change) does not last for too long; thereby reduces the market value in terms of quality and reliability of supply. To enhance the performance of the secondary distribution system there is a need for an automating technology. The aim of this paper is to introduce a method and technology developed for resolving imbalances in a secondary distribution system as a result of the uneven distribution of single phase load across a three phase power system. The technology developed is able to monitor, acquire/display collected data and perform self changing switching actions electronically. This action is in form of rearrangement or transfer of consumer loads for optimal performance of the distribution feeder. The proposed switching technology is based on open- transition switch that enables transfer or rearrangement of consumer loads in a three-phase system within milliseconds with supervisory control system. The following methodologies: System Simulator - Matlab (Simulink), Virtual Instrumentation-Lab VIEW and Hardware implementation were applied for the validation of the proposed techniqu

A novel palmprint segmentation technique

Recent paradigm shift from the conventional contact based palmprint recognition to contactless based systems (CBS) has necessitated the development of a variety of these systems. A major challenge of these systems is it robustness to illumination variation in unconstrained environment, thus making segmentation difficult. In this paper, the acquired image undergoes color space conversion and the output is filtered using coefficients obtained from the training of an artificial neural network (ANN) based model coefficient determination technique. Performance analysis of the proposed technique shows better performance in term of mean square error, true positive rate and accuracy when compared with two other techniques. Furthermore, it has also been observed that the proposed method is illumination invariant hence its suitability for deployment in contactless palmprint recognition systems

Palmprint recognition using principal lines characterization

In this paper, a novel contactless Palmprint recognition system using palm print principal line-based feature extraction technique has been proposed. The discriminative Palmprint features were extracted from a pre-processed acquired images using easily available and low cost camera. Distances from endpoints to endpoints and point of interception to endpoints were calculated and transformed to frequency domain by the application of Discrete Fourier Transformed (DFT) technique. The extracted K-points DFT coefficients has been used as the discriminating features for recognition and identification purposes using correlation technique, power spectral matching and Euclidean distance measure. The proposed technique has been observed to be rotation, scale and translation invariant and accuracy of 100% was achieved in a 1-to-4 recognition and classification verification

Morphometric Observations of the tongue of the domestic duck (Anas platyrhynchos domestica).

A Biometric study was conducted on the tongue of twenty-five (25) adult domestic duck collected from the Sokoto metropolitan poultry and fish modern market, over a period of seven days . A pair of scissors, a scalpel and a blade was used to incise, excise, separate or debride various parts of the oral cavity to expose the organ for research. Results showed that the tongue is characterized by an elongated triangular format. At a point, approximately 2/3 the length of the lingual corpus there is a distinct depression, separating the caudal one-third of the lingual corpus from its rostral two-third. On the dorsal surface of the apex and body of the tongue, a median groove is found. A unique feature of the tongue in domestic Duck is the presence of many fine overlapping needle-shaped processes at both lateral sides of the caudal lingual apex. A single row of large conical papillae is observed symmetrically in the marginal region between the body and root of the tongue. Biometrically the mean dimensio