THE STUDY OF ELECTRICAL AND MECHANICAL PROPERTIES OF MONTMORILLONITE CLAY POLYESTER NANO-COMPOSITE

Montmorillonite clay polyester nano composite were successfully prepared by melt insertion method at 5wt%, 10wt%, 15wt%, 20wt% and 25wt% of Montmorillonite clay. The electrical and mechanical properties of the produced composites were studied. Five specimens for each test was analysed. Results obtained indicates that while a drastic decrease in the impact energy of 100 was observed, the maximum tensile strength and young’s modulus values of 50.27 MPa and 8.7 GPa respectively were obtained at 10% filler concentration. The compressive strength increases by 48% and 100% at 15wt% and 20wt% filler concentration respectively. An increase in dielectric strength ( 100%) and capacitance (32%) of the samples with each filler addition of up to 25% with 3 times increase in hardness at 25wt%. was observed

Energy Audit of an Industry: a Case Study of Fabrication Company

Energy is one of the major inputs for the economic development of any country. In the case of the developing countries, the energy sector assumes a critical importance in view of the ever-increasing energy needs requiring huge investments to meet them. Energy audit will determine energy wastage and losses, and provide techniques and ways to minimize the losses. The payback period of the energy audit programmed for the industry was found to be 14 months. The energy consumption techniques suggested by the energy audit will not only minimize the losses but also reduce monthly electricity bill. The objective of Energy Management is to achieve and maintain optimum energy procurement and utilization, throughout the organization as to minimize energy costs and wastage without affecting production and quality. Energy Audit is the key to a systematic approach for decision-making in the area of energy management. It attempts to balance the total energy inputs with its use, and serves to identify all the energy streams in a facility

The Design of a Portable Municipal Waste Incinerator with Fuzzy Logic Based Support for Emission Estimation

A fuzzy logic interface system to estimate oxygen requirement for complete combustion as well as the level of pollution from incinerator gas flue in order to manage solid waste from domestic, institutional, medical and industrial sources was designed. The designed incinerator is double chambered operating with a maximum temperature of 760 °C in the lower chamber and 1000°C in the upper chamber. The insulating wall is made up of a refractory brick of 55mm in thickness having a 2mm thickness low carbon steel as the outer wall. Hydrogen Chloride (HCl) and Nitrous oxides (NO)x are the gases was used to demonstrate the Fuzzy Inference System (FIS) model. The FIS was built with five input variables (Food, PVC, Polythene, Paper and Textile) and three input variables with two membership functions. The FIS was developed to estimation the degree of possibility distribution of pollution that should be expected when a certain composition of waste is incinerated. The plots of composition of waste high in food against oxygen require for combustion gives a possibility distribution of about 0.9 which is high according to the fuzzy set definition while the plot of waste composition high in PVC against HCL shows linearity

Performance Evaluation of the Effect of Waste Paper on Groundnut Shell Briquette

Current energy shortage and environmental issues resulting from the use of fossil fuels have lead to exploitation of renewable energy resources that includes municipal waste and agricultural residues. These residues are available, indigenous and are environmental friendly but some can not be used directly in combustion process due high moisture content and low volumetric energy unless by briquetting. The study was undertaken to assess the combustion characteristic of binderless briquettes produced from waste paper and groundnut shell. Combustion characteristics investigated were ignition time, burning time, calorific values, burning rate, specific fuel consumption, fuel efficiency and water boiling time. The calorific values of the briquettes ranged from 19.51 - 19.92 MJ/kg, while the thermal efficiency ranges between 13.75 – 21.64%, other results shows that the average burning rate between 0.511 and 1.133 kg/hr and the specific fuel consumption ranges between 0.087 and 0.131 J/g. The recorded boiling time values were between 17.5 and 30.0 minutes for cold start and 15.0 and 20.0 minutes for hot start. The results shows that waste paper and groundnut shell up to 25% in composition composite briquettes were found to have good combustion characteristics which qualify them as alternative to firewood for domestic and industrial energy. However, production of briquettes from waste paper and groundnut shell at mixing ratio of 85:15 was found to comparatively better from all experiment conducted

Compositions Optimization of Antang Corundum for Developing Advanced Ceramic

The research aims to study and optimize the formulation of materials required for advanced ceramic production using response surface methodology (RSM). In this research effort, the five (5) process independent variables studied with their corresponding levels are: Antang corundum powder, A (92.2 – 100 %W); polyvinyl alcohol, B (0 – 5 %W); CaO, C (0 – 2.3 %W); MgO, D (0 – 0.5 %W); and the sintering temperature, E (1200 – 1500 °C). The mechanical property responses determined were density, ρ, compressive strength, C/S, flexural strength, F/S; which are key characteristics of ceramics for armour applications. The optimized density, compressive strength and flexural strength of the sintered Antang corundum are 3.45 g/cm3 g, 1982 MPa and 295 MPa respectively; while the respective RSM prediction values are 3.45 g/cm3 g, 1982 MPa and 295 MPa. On comparing the determined optimum mechanical responses of the sintered Antang ceramic with the maximum RSM prediction values, there is high level of assurance in using RSM for the formulation process in ceramic armour development

Impact of Working Fluids and Performance of Isobutane in the Refrigeration System

The effect of heat transfer medium (HTM) on the environment is associated with ozone layer depletion and global warming. The role of HTM (working fluid) in the heating and air conditioning industries is paramount, which cannot be underestimated. The conventional refrigerant has been predominantly used over decades due to their thermodynamic properties. However, hydrocarbon refrigerants such as isobutane are considered substitutes because they have negligible global warming potential and zero ozone depletion. That makes it eco-friendly among other existing refrigerants. The investigation of the refrigeration system’s performance characteristics required consideration for the coefficient of performance, refrigerating effect, and the compressor work; this enables the determination of the system’s efficiency without any assumption. Another factor that suggests a better absorption of refrigerant (working fluid) into a refrigeration system is an increase in the coefficient of performance (COP). The effect will cause a reduction in the rate of energy consumption by the compressor. The result shows that the system’s coefficient of performance when using R600a was 27.1% higher than when working with R134a, with an energy reduction of 23.3%

Comparison of printed glycan array, suspension array and ELISA in the detection of human anti-glycan antibodies

Anti-glycan antibodies represent a vast and yet insufficiently investigated subpopulation of naturally occurring and adaptive antibodies in humans. Recently, a variety of glycan-based microarrays emerged, allowing high-throughput profiling of a large repertoire of antibodies. As there are no direct approaches for comparison and evaluation of multi-glycan assays we compared three glycan-based immunoassays, namely printed glycan array (PGA), fluorescent microsphere-based suspension array (SA) and ELISA for their efficacy and selectivity in profiling anti-glycan antibodies in a cohort of 48 patients with and without ovarian cancer. The ABO blood group glycan antigens were selected as well recognized ligands for sensitivity and specificity assessments. As another ligand we selected P1, a member of the P blood group system recently identified by PGA as a potential ovarian cancer biomarker. All three glyco-immunoassays reflected the known ABO blood groups with high performance. In contrast, anti-P1 antibody binding profiles displayed much lower concordance. Whilst anti-P1 antibody levels between benign controls and ovarian cancer patients were significantly discriminated using PGA (p = 0.004), we got only similar results using SA (p = 0.03) but not for ELISA. Our findings demonstrate that whilst assays were largely positively correlated, each presents unique characteristic features and should be validated by an independent patient cohort rather than another array technique. The variety between methods presumably reflects the differences in glycan presentation and the antigen/antibody ratio, assay conditions and detection technique. This indicates that the glycan-antibody interaction of interest has to guide the assay selection