Economics of biomass fuels for electricity production: a case study with crop residues

In the United Sates and around the world, electric power plants are among the biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change argued was the main cause of climate change and global warming. This dissertation explores the factors which may induce electricity producers to use biomass fuels for power generation and thereby mitigate the impact of greenhouse gas emissions. Analyses in this dissertation suggest that there are two important factors which will play a major role in determining the future degree of bioelectricity production: the price of coal and the future price of carbon emissions. Using The Forest and Agricultural Sector Optimization Model—Green House Gas version (FASOMGHG) in a case study examining the competitiveness of crop residues, this dissertation finds that crop residues currently cost much more than coal as an electricity generation feedstock because they have lower heat content and higher production /hauling costs. For them to become cost competitive with coal, the combined costs of production and hauling must be cut by more than half or the coal price needs to rise. In particular, for crop residues to have any role in electricity generation either the price of coal has to increase to about $43 per ton or the carbon equivalent price must rise to about$15 per ton. The simulation results also show that crop residues with higher heat content such as wheat residues will have greater opportunities in bioelectricity production than the residues with lower heat content. In addition, the analysis shows that improvements in crop yield do not have much impact on bioelectricity production. However, the energy recovery efficiency does have significant positive impact on the bioelectricity desirability but again only if the carbon equivalent price rises substantially. The analysis also shows the desirability of cofiring biomass as opposed to 100% replacement because this reduces haling costs and increases the efficiency of heat recovery. In terms of policy implications, imposing carbon emission restrictions could be an important step in inducing electric power producers to include biofuels in their fuelmix power generation portfolios and achieve significant greenhouse gas emission reductions

Design and development of a bench-top electro-adsorption chiller

Master'sMASTER OF ENGINEERIN

Improvement of an Interoperable and Adaptable Middleware using IoT Semantic Web Technologies

In today changing world, Internet of Things (IoT) is creating a new world, where people and businesses can make more timely and better informed decisions about what they want or need to do. Over the last years, agriculture industry in few countries has been expended to smart agriculture. Nevertheless, the agricultural industry in Myanmar needs to be modernized with the involvement of IoT technologies for crops’ growth monitoring, irrigation decision and harvesting system. However, due to the complexity of IoT middleware, most of the middleware frameworks are designed to be used by IT experts. To allow non-IT experts (e.g. farmers, plant scientist) to configure the sensor devices easier and faster, without knowing the background knowledge of technical details, sensor-level configuration of heterogeneous devices needs to be fully interoperable (network, syntactic, and semantic interoperability) due to the huge number of sensor devices integrated and their diversity in term of data formats, communication protocols, nature of components etc. In this work, we propose a fully interoperable middleware framework that incorporates semantic web technologies with the existing Global Sensor Network middleware to solve the above challenges. The proposed system supports horizontally semantic interoperability which addresses the challenge of adaptability of our approach to different domains. Performance of the proposed system will be implemented and evaluated mainly in crops’ growth of agriculture area of Myanmar

Autonomous Parallel Parking of a Car-Like Mobile Robot with Geometric Path Planning

With the advancement of technology making everything so convenient in these days and ages, autonomous system is very interesting area in the innovating technology. One of the advanced booming technologies for the improvement of human race is autonomous taxi mobile transportation system. It is working well in a district area but it still thrives on making more comfortable. This research will be one point of supporting roles for automobile in parallel parking. An autonomous parallel parking of a car-like mobile robot has been developed in this study. The ultrasonic range sensors are used to detect the working environments and design an s-shaped trajectory between two parallel parked vehicles. One trail maneuver system is used to be moving along the s-shaped trajectory parking path. The s-shaped trajectory is purely based on the geometric approach path planning method. The proposed method is not dependent on the initial pose of the robot but it must be parallel with the parking space. Sensor data are used as the main decision part to change the parking states instance of to find the parking space and adjust robot orientation. Fuzzy filter is applied to stabilize the sensor data and give a quick response input. The working environment is constrained by the wall and sensor arrangement. Visual studio 2013 is used for the user interface window. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through some experimental results with a car-like mobile robot