Perception of Sources, Accessibility and Consequences of Domestic Water Supply in Mbaitoli Local Government Area of Imo State, Nigeria.

The study focused on the accessibility  and consequences of domestic water supply(DWS) in Mbaitoli L. G.A. Structured questionnaire was administered  on 10 autonomous communities that were randomly selected.   Sources of  DWS  evaluated includes : bore hole, stream, pond, rainwater, underground water, water vendor and pipe borne water. The results revealed that rainwater consumption has the highest percentage of 24% with pipe borne water having the lowest percentage of 1%. Accessibility study revealed that 26% travelled between 1-2km, 51% between 3-4km and 23% revealed above >4 km in search of water. The result hygienic condition shown that  69% affirmed the poor hygienic  conditions of sources of DWS, while 48% do not treat water meant for drinking and provision of potable water is on self-help basis constituting 76%,  with Government having 16%, and  Non-governmental Organizations(NGOs) constituting 8%. Based on the results, Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) should be practiced to include Government and NGOs  involvement in water supply, operation and  maintenance  (O&M) of rainwater harvesting (RWH) to: improves water availability, its proximity, its quantity and its quality in order to eradicate women's and girl’s children burden of collecting water for domestic use  and reduce the  amount of rainwater that goes to the drainage  in order to  avoid the floods phenomena. Keywords: Sources, Consequences,  Accessibility ,  Domestic, Water

A comparison of the drying kinetics, energy consumption and colour quality of drying medicinal 1 leaves in direct-solar dryer with different colours of collector cover

© 2023 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. This is the accepted manuscript version of an article which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2023.119076In some countries, Neem and Bitter leaves are often offered as dried medicinal leaves and one of the appealing aspects to consumers is that they retain their original colour after drying. Hence, the purpose of this study was to examine if collector cover colour variations can impact the quality and chlorophyll loss in solar-dried Neem and bitter leaves. To vary the colour spectrum, three distinct coloured polyethene materials with different colours were used as top window-cover for the dryer chamber and collector, which formed a single drying unit of a solar cabinet dryer. The results showed that the yellow-covered solar drying unit achieved 38.8% thermal efficiency, which declined by 1.43% and 10.41% for the blue and white-covered drying unit respectively. The yellow-cover dryer created higher internal temperature and drying rate, enabling it to dry the leaves faster. The average drying rate for Neem and bitter leaves was 0.003762-0.003849kg/h, and 0.004348-0.004689 kg/h respectively. The specific energy consumption for drying the leaves ranged from 10.52-13.89 MJ/kg for all dryers. Colour analysis showed that the yellow-covered dryer dried bitter leaf near its natural colour, while the blue-covered dryer dried Neem near its natural colour. Lograthimic model predicted their moisture ratio better for drying the leaves.Peer reviewe