INSTALLATION AND TESTING OF A 5kW HYDROPOWER TURBINE

This work focused on installation and testing of a hydro power turbine to generate 5 kW of energy for domestic applications.  Water flows into the penstock  from the dam at a height of 6m; the pipe diameter was reduced to   with a reducer socket. Water pressure decreases as it flows through the elbow joint. But such decrease or loss is recovered by a reduction of the pipe diameter to 80 mm and the pipe is long enough, (length = 2000mm) for the water to be fully developed before it enters the turbine at optimum speed. As the water flows through the runner of the turbine, its pressure reduces. The reduction imparts reaction on the runner and power is transferred to the turbine shaft. To prevent back flow or sucking back of water pressure into the turbine, a draft tube and a non-return valve are incorporated into the outlet of the turbine. The turbine shaft speed recorded with the aid of a tachometer is 298.33rpm and the dynamic pressure recorded at the turbine inlet, with the aid of a water pressure gauge is 170 kN/m2. This gave an output power of 4.98 kW  at a design flow rate of 0.106 m3/s. The installation and testing of Francis turbine, pipe network and fittings were successfully carried out. It is obvious from the test results that the output power can power the street lights along Imo-street in the University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria.     &nbsp

Assessment of Nigerian International Broadcasting by Nigerians in Diaspora

International broadcasting is projecting an image of the country of broadcast to an external audience. The external audience comprise not just foreigners but also citizens of the host country who reside outside that country. The question then is, to what extent are Nigerian international broadcasters satisfying their country’s citizens who reside in the Diaspora? This study sought to find out the assessment of Nigeria’s international broadcasting by her expatriates; that is her citizens living abroad. The survey methodology was employed in this research. The technique was purposive as only the responses of Nigerians who respond in the diaspora were sought. Questionnaire was used as the instrument of data collection. The questionnaire was uploaded online via the survey monkey for Nigerians residing in the Diaspora to respond to. There were 159 respondents but only 150 completely filled their questionnaires; these were analyzed for this research. Findings showed that majority of respondents (66.67) watch Nigerian international broadcasters on weekends, and most people (27%) watch news probably to keep abreast with happenings back home. About a third (37%) of the respondents watch Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) International and 53.3% assessed the programme quality as poor especially the pictures which are adjudged as lacking in professionalism. However, the respondents considered the information received from the stations they watch as credible. It is recommended that there should be improvement in the standard of professionalism of presenters so as to make the programmes more appealing to viewers as presentation is the window to the world. Funding is another crucial issue. When funds are available, programmes will be packaged better and more professionals will be employed to engender more viewership from the Diaspora. Keywords: International broadcasting, external audience, International broadcasters, Expatriate

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Analyses of Energy and Exergy in Thin Layer Drying of Okra (Abelmoschus esculentus) Slices using Centre Shaft Rotary Tray Cabinet (CSRTC) Dryer

This paper presents a simulation of the drying process of okra (Abelmoschus esculentus) in a Center Shaft (CS) Rotary Tray Cabinet Dryer using three drying temperatures (50, 60 and 70 °C). ANSYS 14.5 Workbench was used to simulate the dryer model in 2D (2 Dimensional). The detail of the CFD simulation was utilized to investigate the energy and exergy of the dryer. The ANSYS Design Modeler was used to model the 2D representation of the dryer and the meshing was done using ANSYS ICEM. ANSYS Fluent CFD solver was then used to calculate the alternative using the normal turbulence-realizable k-epsilon model in a steady-state system with improved wall temperature treatment. The simulation outcome was used in calculating the dryer's exergy and energy analysis based on the thermal efficiency. It was noted that the simulated temperature from the experiment is greater than that of the experiment. The results indicated that the experimental energy utilization (EU), energy utilization ratio (EUR) and energy efficiency increased from 14.1 to 57.93 J/s, 0.15 to 0.20 and 18.89 to 33.98 percent, while the simulated energy utilization ratio increased from 23.91 to 57.68 J/s, 0.19 to 0.20 and 26.21 to 33.40 percent, respectively, and as the drying air temperature increased from 50 °C to 70 °C. Experimental exergy inflow, outflow, exergy loss and exergy efficiency increased from 4.01 J/s to 6.98 J/s, 1.83 J/s to 1.9 J/s, 3.18 J/s to 5.07 J/s and 21 to 27%, while simulated air temperatures increased from 5.01 J/s to 7.49 J/s, 1.33 J/s to 2.20 J/s, 3.66 J/s to 5.29 J/s and 27 to 29% respectively with respect to the drying air temperature range (50–70 °C). Model equations were derived from the plotted graphs to express the energy and exergy parameters as a function of drying temperature

Awareness and desirability of antenatal attendees about analgesia during childbirth in a university teaching hospital in southern Nigeria

Background: Labour pain is among the most severe pains humans experience and when unrelieved, is associated with adverse maternal and foetal effects. Methods: Structured questionnaires were administered to 268 consenting parous women in the antenatal clinic of the University of Uyo Teaching Hospital, Nigeria over a 4-months period. Results: The majority of the respondents were between 25-34 years (84.0%), and were well educated (64.4%). About half (59.7%) of the respondents did not know that pain free labour was possible, while only 6.7% of the women had pain relief in their last delivery. The majority (81.4%) desired pain relief during their next delivery. Books (35.1%) and friends/relatives (32.4%) were the most common sources of information on pain relief in labour. Perception of pain was positively associated with the educational level of the women (P=0.013).There was also a significant association between ethnicity and desirability for labour pain relief. Conclusions: The practice of obstetric analgesia in labour is far from optimal in our center. The need to create awareness about pain relief in labour and its importance specifically among our antenatal clients cannot be overemphasized. Keywords: Labour analgesia, Antenatal attendees, Uy

Nutrient composition of watermelon (Citrullis lanatus (Thunb.) Matsum.&Nakai) and egusi melon (Citrullus colocynthis (L.) Schrad.) seeds

This study investigated the nutrient composition of the seeds of two cultivars of Citrullis lanatus (\u27Rhotmas\u27 and \u27Sugar Baby\u27) and compared it with Citrullus colocynthis. The moisture content, ash, crude fiber, ether extract, crude protein and true protein ranged from 5.43 to 6.82, 2.78 to 3.72, 1.66 to 3.94, 55.7 to 58.7, 19.16 to 25.18 and 10.8 to 13%, respectively. The starch content, total sugar and reducing sugar varied between 143.7 and 172.7, 53.7 and 96.5, 5.6 and 9.5 mg/g, respectively. Iron, copper, zinc, calcium and magnesium ranged from 191 to 211, 20.12 to 35.03, 68.97 to 92.57, 98.79 to 233, and 79.75 to 123.9 mg/kg, respectively. Heavy metals (lead and cadmium) and antinutrients (phytate, oxalate and cyanide) were below deleterious levels. Arginine, glutamic acid and aspartic acids were the most abundant amino acids, whereas lysine was the limiting amino acid. It is concluded that watermelon seeds were better in nutritional value compared to egusi melon seeds and therefore could be regarded as a potential sources of food if exploited

Diversity of indigenous arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi in rhizosphere of upland rice (Oryza sativa L.) varieties in Southwest Nigeria

Article Details: Received: 2020-02-05      |      Accepted: 2020-05-07      |      Available online: 2020-06-30https://doi.org/10.15414/afz.2020.23.02.42-48 Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) have the potential to increase crop productivity and play a key role in the functioning and sustainability of most agroecosystems. However, limited information is available on the divervisity of AMF associated with upland rice varieties in Southwest Nigeria. Field survey was conducted to investigate colonization and diversity of AMF in 13 upland rice varieties commonly grown in Southwest Nigeria. Root and soil samples were collected from rice fields in 2012. The results showed natural root colonization of all the rice varieties by AMF with highest root colonization in ITA 157and Ofada. The spore densities retrieved from the different rhizospheres were relatively high, varying from 13 spores in UORW 111 to 174 spores in Ofada with a mean of 67.6 spores per 20 g dry soil. Glomus was observed to be the most abundant AMF genus. Funneliformis mosseae was the most frequently occurring AMF species (96.2%) with relative density (RD) of 32.2%, followed by Glomus intraradices, Claroideoglomus etunicatum, and Glomus clareium. This study showed that AMF naturally colonized the roots of these rice varieties and diversity of different AMF genera in rice rhizosphere. This study will help draw attention to natural colonization of AMF in rice producing areas of Nigeria that can influence future possibility of using inocula of the dominant AMF species in upland rice cultivation.Keywords: Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, community structure, diversity, upland rice, spore densityReferences ADEYEMI, N.O. et al. (2020). Effect of commercial arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi inoculant on growth and yield of soybean under controlled and natural field conditions. Journal of Plant Nutrition, 43(4), 487–499, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/019041 67.2019.1685101 ADEYEMI, N.O. et al. (2019). Identification and relative abundance of native arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi associated with oil-seed crops and maize (Zea mays L.) in derived savannah of Nigeria. Acta fytotechn zootechn, 22(3), 84–89. DOI: https://doi.org/10.15414/afz.2019.22.03.84-89 ADEYEMI, N. et al. (2017). Yield and yield attributes responses of soybean (Glycine max L. Merrill) to elevated CO2 and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi inoculation in the humid transitory rainforest. Notulae Scientia Biologicae, 9(2), 233–241. DOI: https://doi.org/10.15835/nsb9210002 BARBER, N.A. et al. (2013). Linking agricultural practices, mycorrhizal fungi, and traits mediating plant-insect interactions. Ecol Appl, 23(7), 1519–1530.BŁASZKOWSKI, J. (2012) Glomeromycota. Kraków: W. Szafer Institute of Botany, Polish Academy of Sciences. BOUYOUCOS, G.H. (1951). A recalibration of the hydrometer method for testing mechanical analysis of soils. Agronomy Journal, 43,434–438.BRUNDRETT, M.C. and TEDERSOO, L. (2018) Evolutionary history of mycorrhizal symbioses and global host plant diversity. New Phytol, 220,1108–1115. CAMPOS-SORIANO, L. et al. (2010). Activation of basal defense mechanisms of rice plants by Glomus intraradices does not affect the arbuscular mycorrhizal symbiosis. New Phytol, 188(2), 597–614. CHEN, M. et al. (2018) Beneficial services of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi – from ecology to application. Frontiers in Plant Science, 9. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpls.2018.01270DAVISON, J. et al. (2015). Global assessment of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungus diversity reveals very low endemism. Science, 349, 970–973. DE ANDRADE-JÚNIOR, J.A. et al. (2018) Fixação de carbono em sistemas agroecológicos na região do Vale do São Patrício, Goiás. Científica – Multidiscip J, 5, 85–98. DE MOURA, J.B. et al. (2018) Taxa de colonização micorrízica sob diferentes sistemas de cultivo no cerrado em cana-deaçúcar. Diálogos & Ciência, 2, 60–66. GIANINAZZI, S. et al. (2010). Agroecology: The key role of arbuscular mycorrhizas in ecosystem services. Mycorrhiza, 20(8), 519–530. INVAM (2018). International culture collection of (vesicular) arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. Morgantown: West Virginia University. HAZARD, C. et al. (2013). The role of local environment and  geographical distance in determining community composition of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi at the landscape scale. The ISME Journal, 7, 498–508. JIANG, Y.N. et al. (2017). Plants transfer lipids to sustain colonization by mutualistic mycorrhizal and parasitic fungi. Science, 356, 1172–1175. JOHNSON, N.C. (2010). Resource stoichiometry elucidates the structure and function of arbuscular mycorrhizas across scales. New Phytol, 185(3), 631–647. LEKBERG, Y. and KOIDE, R.T. (2005). Is plant performance limited by abundance of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi? A metaanalysis of studies published between 1988 and 2003. New Phytol, 168(1). LIN, X. et al. (2012). Long-term balanced fertilization decreases arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal diversity in an arable soil in north China revealed by 454 pyrosequencing. Environmental Science & Technology, 46, 5764–5771. LUGINBUEHL, L.H. et al. (2017). Fatty acids in arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi are synthesized by the host plant. Science, 356, 1175–1178. LUMINI, E. et al. (2011). Different farming and water regimes in Italian rice fields affect arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal soil communities. Ecol Appl, 21(5), 1696–1707.OEHL, F. et al. (2010). Soil type and land use intensity determine the composition of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal communities. Soil Biology and Biochemistry, 42, 724–738. OEHL, F. et al. (2017) Diversity and biogeography of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi in agricultural soils. Biol Fertil Soils, (53), 777–797. PEYRET-GUZZON, M. et al. (2016). Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal communities and Rhizophagus irregularis populations shift in response to short term ploughing and fertilisation in a buffer strip. Mycorrhiza, 26, 33–46. PHILLIPS, J.M. and HAYMAN, D.S. (1970). Improved procedures for clearing roots and staining parasitic and vesicular-arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi for rapid assessment of infection. Trans Br Mycol Soc., 55,158–IN18. PIVATO, B. et al. (2007). Medicago species affect the community composition of arbuscular myccorhizal fungi associated with roots. New Phytologist 176, 197–210. RILLIG, M.C. and MUMMEY, D.L. (2006). Mycorrhizas and soil structure. New Phytol, 171(1), 41–53. SILVA-FLORES, P. et al. (2019) Factors affecting arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi spore density in the Chilean Mediterraneantype ecosystem. J Soil Sci Plant Nutr, 19, 42–50. SMITH, S.E. and READ, D.J. (2008). Mycorrhizal symbiosis. 3rd ed., New York: Academic Press. SNOECK, D. et al. (2010). 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Women’s Behavioral Patterns in Domestic Tasks in Western Nigeria: Hazards Forecasting with Neural Network Classifier

Behavioral pattern is the characteristic ways a person acts and has been recognized as a cause of many home accidents (h-accd). This study reviewed the types and prevalence of injuries among women in domestic works and proposes a model using Artificial Neural Network (ANN) function to forecast the safety level of women in domestic duty. The study was conducted in some parts of Western Nigeria among 340 subjects (171 married and 169 unmarried) using questionnaire. SPSS was used for data analysis. The ANN function was developed in MATLAB 2015a using the subjects’ behavioral patterns and the model was used to predict safety in domestic duties (d-duties) among some women. ‘Cuts/laceration’ (40%) and ‘skin contact with hot substance’ (35.6%) were commonly reported. Carelessness (26.5%) and distraction (22.1%) were the main leading factors across the groups. Marital status and h-accd (Chi-square =4.323 and p= .038); ‘hours spent on domestic works’ and ‘the h-accd’ were both significant among other tested groups variables. With the developed ANN function, the results of the MSE was 0.33626 indicating that the function predicted the exact value. The result of the predicted h-accd (safety= -0.5445, hazards= 1.0228) in d-duties of the tested variables with the ANN function, showed a very low level of safety. The article concludes that the developed model is reliable and a recommended ergonomic tool useful in all homes, most especially where women perform most domestic works

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe