Network Reconfiguration for Loss Reduction and Voltage Profile Improvement of 110-Bus Radial Distribution System Using Exhaustive Search Techniques

Nowadays, the electricity demand is increasing day by day and hence it is very important not only to extract electrical energy from all possible new power resources but also to reduce power losses to an acceptable minimum level in the existing distribution networks where a large amount of power dissipation occurred. In Myanmar, a lot of power is remarkably dissipated in distribution system.  Among methods in reducing power losses, network reconfiguration method is employed for loss minimization and exhaustive technique is also applied to achieve the minimal loss switching scheme. Network reconfiguration in distribution systems is performed by opening sectionalizing switches and closing tie switches of the network for loss reduction and voltage profile improvement. The distribution network for existing and reconfiguration conditions are modelled and simulated by Electrical Transient Analyzer Program (ETAP) 7.5 version software. The inputs are given based on the real time data collected from 33/11kV substations under Yangon Electricity Supply Board (YESB). The proposed method is tested on 110-Bus, overhead AC radial distribution network of Dagon Seikkan Township since it is long-length, overloaded lines and high level of power dissipation is occurred in this system. According to simulation results of load flow analysis, voltage profile enhancement and power loss reduction for proposed system are revealed in this paper

Feature based design for jigless assembly

The work presented in this thesis was undertaken as part of the three-year ‘Jigless Aerospace Manufacture’ (JAM) project which was set-up to investigate and address the significant scientific, technological and economic issues to enable a new design, manufacture and assembly philosophy based on minimising product specific jigs, fixtures and tooling. The main goal of the JAM project at Cranfield was the development of appropriate jigless methods and principles, and the subsequent redesign of the JAM project demonstrator structure – a section of the Airbus A320 aircraft Fixed Leading Edge – to fully investigate and realise the capabilities of jigless methodologies and principles. The particular focus of research activity described in this thesis was the development of a methodology to design for jigless assembly and a process of selecting assembly features to enable jigless assembly. A review of the literature has shown that no methodologies exist to specifically design for jigless assembly; however, previous relevant research has been built upon and extended with the incorporation of novel tools and techniques. To facilitate the assembly feature selection process for jigless assembly, an Assembly Feature Library was created that broadened and expanded the conventional definition and use of assembly features. The developed methodology, assembly feature selection process and Feature Library have been applied and validated on the JAM project demonstrator structure to serve as a Case Study for the tools and techniques developed by the research. Additionally, a Costing Analysis was carried out which suggests that the use of the tools and techniques to enable jigless assembly could have a large and considerable impact on both the Non-Recurring and Recurring costs associated with the design, manufacture and assembly of aircraft.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Factors associated with psychological distress among Myanmar residents during COVID-19 pandemic crises

Background: COVID-19 pandemic reached a public health emergency status of international concern. The impacts and events associated with this were associated with adverse psychological impacts among the general public globally. This study aimed to determine the prevalence of psychological distress and to identify predictors associated with psychological distress due to the COVID-19 pandemic among the population in Myanmar. Design and Methods: A cross-sectional survey was conducted from March to April 2020 among adults, 18 years old and above, who reside in Myanmar through a structured questionnaire distributed in social media platforms. Univariate and Bivariate analyses were used to estimate the prevalence of COVID-19 Peritraumatic Distress Index (CPDI) symptoms and to test the associations between CPDI and the exposure variables. Logistic Regression Analysis was done to identify significant predictors of distress. Results: There were 530 participants in this study.37.4% of them did not have psychological distress,55.6% experienced mild to moderate psychological distress, and 7% experienced severe psychological distress due to COVID-19 pandemic. Simple and Multiple Logistic Regression Analyses were performed to determine the factors associated with psychological distress due to COVID-19. Conclusions: It was shown that the self-employed group and age group older than 45 years old had more psychological distress than others. However, Buddhists and people from the capital city had less distress than other religions and districts. This study recommends the government to develop better strategies for self-employed groups, elders, and the poor for a support, relief, and resettlement of their ruined status

Improving the Performance of Low-resourced Speaker Identification with Data Preprocessing

Automatic speaker identification is done to tackle daily security problems. Speech data collection is an essential but very challenging task for under-resourced languages like Burmese. The speech quality is crucial to accurately recognize the speaker’s identity. This work attempted to find the optimal speech quality appropriate for Burmese tone to enhance identification compared with other more richy resourced languages on Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs). A Burmese speech dataset was created as part of our work because no appropriate dataset available for use. In order to achieve better performance, we preprocessed the foremost recording quality proper for not only Burmese tone but also for nine other Asian languages to achieve multilingual speaker identification. The performance of the preprocessed data was evaluated by comparing with the original data, using a time delay neural network (TDNN) together with a subsampling technique that can reduce time complexity in model training. The experiments were investigated and analyzed on speech datasets of ten Asian languages to reveal the effectiveness of the data preprocessing. The dataset outperformed the original dataset with improvements in terms of  equal error rate (EER). The evaluation pointed out that the performance of the system with the preprocessed dataset improved that of the original dataset

Malaria Elimination in the Greater Mekong Subregion: Challenges and Prospects

Malaria is a significant public health problem and impediment to socioeconomic development in countries of the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS), which comprises Cambodia, China’s Yunnan Province, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam. Over the past decade, intensified malaria control has greatly reduced the regional malaria burden. Driven by increasing political commitment, motivated by recent achievements in malaria control, and urged by the imminent threat of emerging artemisinin resistance, the GMS countries have endorsed a regional malaria elimination plan with a goal of eliminating malaria by 2030. However, this ambitious, but laudable, goal faces a daunting array of challenges and requires integrated strategies tailored to the region, which should be based on a mechanistic understanding of the human, parasite, and vector factors sustaining continued malaria transmission along international borders. Malaria epidemiology in the GMS is complex and rapidly evolving. Spatial heterogeneity requires targeted use of the limited resources. Border malaria accounts for continued malaria transmission and represents sources of parasite introduction through porous borders by highly mobile human populations. Asymptomatic infections constitute huge parasite reservoir requiring interventions in time and place to pave the way for malaria elimination. Of the two most predominant malaria parasites, Plasmodium falciparum and P. vivax, the prevalence of the latter is increasing in most member GMS countries. This parasite requires the use of 8-aminoquinoline drugs to prevent relapses from liver hypnozoites, but high prevalence of glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency in the endemic human populations makes it difficult to adopt this treatment regimen. The recent emergence of resistance to artemisinins and partner drugs in P. falciparum has raised both regional and global concerns, and elimination efforts are invariably prioritized against this parasite to avert spread. Moreover, the effectiveness of the two core vector control interventions—insecticide-treated nets and indoor residual spraying—has been declining due to insecticide resistance and increased outdoor biting activity of mosquito vectors. These technical challenges, though varying from country to country, require integrated approaches and better understanding of the malaria epidemiology enabling targeted control of the parasites and vectors. Understanding the mechanism and distribution of drug-resistant parasites will allow effective drug treatment and prevent, or slow down, the spread of drug resistance. Coordination among the GMS countries is essential to prevent parasite reintroduction across the international borders to achieve regional malaria elimination

Evaluation of Tropical Herbaceous Legumes for Drought Resistance in Myanmar

Animal nutrition systems in the tropical and subtropical countries utilize a wide range of feedstuffs, mainly the crops and agricultural by-products, grasses, legumes, trees and shrubs. During the dry season, the crude protein concentration in the native grasses can drop below 3% crude protein (Atta-Krah and Reynolds, 1989). Fodder tree is not sufficient and is of low quality in Myanmar (Myo and Aye, 2007). Shrubs represent an enormous potential source of protein for ruminants in the tropics (Devendra, 1992). Browses are rich in nitrogen and minerals which are low in other conventional feeds of tropical regions. Herbaceous legume species play an important role in feeding ruminants worldwide. Herbaceous forage legume have been identified as potential protein supplements for ruminants since they contain high crude protein, minerals and vitamins needed for the growth of ruminal microbes (Norton and Poppi,1995). Herbaceous legumes can be grown as a relay within cereal crops or as a rotation with cereals. Herbaceous legumes can access ‎atmospheric ‎N‎ (‘fixation’)‎ through‎ bacterial‎ activity‎ in‎ root ‎nodules.‎ The‎ ‘fixed’ ‎N‎ becomes‎ available ‎to‎ the‎ legume and subsequent cereal crops. Herbaceous legumes are best planted from seed (Nulik et al., 2013). The aim of using herbaceous legumes in cropping systems is to increase animal productivity, particularly live weight gain in animals being prepared for market. Herbaceous legumes may be fed directly to animals as fresh material in the late wet and early dry seasons, with browse or tree legumes retained for later dry season feeding, or stored as hay and fed in the late dry or early wet seasons when the availability and quality of local feed is lower (Nulik et al., 2013). Legume based pastures give high individual animal performance for growth, fattening, reproduction and wool growth. Cattle live weight gain has been related positively to the proportion of legume in the sward (Mureithi et al., 1995). As pastures become mature, they are characterized by high content of fibre with a higher grade of lignifications and low protein content (Enoh et al., 2005). In Myanmar there is only 0.35% cultivated pasture area to that of cultivated acreages. The improvement and development of pasture is a necessity for Myanmar (Myo and Aye, 2007). For that reason it is needed to evaluate the yield herbaceous legumes for the potential use for ruminants in Myanmar

Selection of Suitable Varieties of Grasses for Myanmar

The basal feed resources for ruminants available in most developing countries in the tropics are crop residues, pasture from infertile land, for example communal land, or agro-industrial by-products. These are low in protein and of low digestibility. A major problem facing livestock producers in tropical areas is proper nutrition for their animals during the dry season when pastures, cereal residues and maize stover are limiting in nutritional quality. The researchers in Myanmar have tried to improve the nutritive value of fibrous agricultural residues. Aung Aung et al. (2006) supplemented the sesame and chickpea husk to bulls fed on urea-treated rice straw. One way of improving the utilisation of such crop residues is by proper supplementation with leguminous forages (Poppi and McLennan 1995). In most regions of Myanmar, the green forage is available during the rainfall and become shortage during dry season. Therefore, feedstuff for ruminant animals mainly has to depend upon the availability of agricultural by-products. Almost more than half of the livestock population of Myanmar is inhabited in dry zone and thus, to overcome the scarcity of the feedstuff during summer, the irrigation system was introduced in these areas for the development of agriculture. A simple and effective way to increase livestock production is to grow improved pastures. Throughout Myanmar, extensive areas of idle land could grow excellent pasture. At present, most of the “pastures” consist of low rank, poor quality grasses and a limited range of edible shrubs. During prolonged dry periods, grazing animals subsist on dry mature roughage of poor quality (Myo Kywe and Tin Mg Aye, 2007). Grass species, which can rapidly grow after the rain also having drought tolerance, would be very useful in the production system. There is still little information on the use of forage in Myanmar. It is needed to select the grass species which have drought resistance in Myanmar and thus this experiment was conducted to evaluate a range of introduced tropical grasses in the central dry zone of Myanmar

Effect of semen collection methods on the quality of pre- and post-thawed Bali cattle (Bos javanicus) spermatozoa.

This study was conducted to evaluate the response of Bali bulls (Bos javanicus) to different semen collection methods and their effects on fresh and post-thawed semen quality. The collection methods employed were electro-ejaculation (EE), transrectal massage (RM) and RM followed by EE (RM + EE). A total of 25 untrained Bali bulls (age between 2 and 4 years old) were subjected to the different semen collection methods. Fresh semen samples from all the 25 bulls were evaluated for volume, pH, general motility, live/dead ratio and abnormality using the conventional method. For fresh and frozen samples collected by EE and RM from 10 bulls, computer-assisted semen analysis system was used for precise quantitative measurement of motility, velocity and forward progression. Accucell photometer was used to measure sperm concentration in all samples, regardless fresh and frozen. Semen samples were obtained 100% of the attempts using EE, 84% using RM and 96% using RM + EE. There were no differences among the collection methods for fresh semen quality characteristics, including motility, morphology and viability, but pH and volume were higher for EE than RM and RM + EE. Higher sperm concentration was observed in semen collected by RM than the other two methods. Different age groups (2–3 and >3–4 years old) of the bulls did not show significant differences in volume, pH, sperm concentration, percentages in motility, live/dead ratio and normal sperm morphology. The quality of semen for general and progressive motility, VAP, VSL and VCL and acrosomal integrity after thawing was higher for RM than EE. In conclusion, Bali bulls appeared to respond best to EE and the combination of RM + EE than RM, as a method of semen collection, with a shorter time of stimulation required. Differences in age of the Bali bulls did not affect the semen quality