Assessment of Physicochemical Properties of some Bitumens from Nigerian Resources

Bitumen is a cheap, common, and important material in today’s technological world. Bitumens gotten at different locations on earth, and produced from different manufacturing processes, or crude feedstocks can however have wide variations in physico-chemical properties and levels of service performances. Hence reliability, handling, and modification in technological usage of different bitumens demands that proper information on a given harvested one should be consulted. Nigeria has large reserves of natural bitumen resources and potentials for sustained production of bitumen in large quantity, but basic applicable public information is lacking on bitumens at most locations of the resources. In this paper, proper test-obtained result of the properties is presented for three bitumen samples obtained from some important sources in the country. Assessment of the results vis-a-vis available information on bitumens elsewhere indicate that any clear surface or underground natural bitumen obtainable in the region of Agbabu village in Ondo State, and a manufactured type from Kaduna Refining and Petrochemical Company (KRPC) in the country are comparable with bitumens of good or acceptable qualities from other locations in the world. Bitumen from the region and the as-manufactured are therefore recommended to be producing in large available quantity and exploiting for different technological applications

Sodium Benzoate and Bitumen Coatings as Inhibitors of Corrosion Deterioration of Mechanical Properties of Low Carbon Steel

ABSTRAC

Wear Behaviour of Al-Si-Fe Alloy/Coconut Shell Ash Particulate Composites

Wear behaviour of aluminium alloy (Al-Si-Fe) reinforced with coconut shell ash particles (CSAp) fabricated by stir casting process was investigated. The wear and frictional properties of the metal matrix composites was studied by performing dry sliding wear test using a pin-on-disc wear tester by varying the applied load from 10-50 N, speed 2.0 m/s and sliding distance 4000 m. The morphology of the worn out surface was determined by scanning electron microscope (SEM). The results show that the coefficient of friction increases with increasing load for the Al-Si-Fe alloy and the composites containing CSAp. It is observed that, as the applied load increases, the wear rate also increases but decreased with CSAp addition. This is because, whenever applied load increases, the friction at the contact surface of the material and rotating disc obviously increases. Hence, incorporation of the coconut shell particles in the Al-Si-Fe alloy matrix as reinforcement increases the wear resistance of the materia

Optimizing the processing parameters for modular production of printed circuit boards

The goal of any processing system is to produce quality products at optimum cost. For a PCB processing system, the most important processing parameters that could impart on the quality and cost of the board are temperature of processing solutions and time duration of each processing stage. An evaluation of the processing system at CERT was carried out with the view to determine the optimum processing conditions for the system that would ensure best quality at minimum cost. The evaluation involves the processing of several experimental boards under varying times and temperatures. The optimum values for the parameters are determined by employing a systems approach to analyze the observations from each process. Nigerian Journal of Physics Vol. 16(2) 2004: 21-2