Mehran University Research Journal of Engineering and Technology

6

Authors: Muhmammad Rafique Daudpoto; Mir Ghulam Haider Talpur; Feroz Shah; Aijaz Khooharo

Regression is a statistical method that is generally used for forecasting and prediction. It helps us to estimate the relationship between a dependent variable and one or more independent variables. This is the most widely used technique that best approximates the individual data points. It has found numerous successful applications in Engineering, Science, business and other fields. Getting average removal % of Biological Oxygen Demand (BOD5) from greywater through Rotating Biological Contactor (RBC), following experiment was conducted in Sindh University hostels using different parameters such as Hydraulic Retention Time (HRT) i.e. 2 hours (0.42 liter per min), 2.5 hours (0.33 l/min) and 3 hours (0.28 l/min) and multiple number of discs i.e. 40, 42, 44, 46, 48, 50 and 52. Consequences reveal that linear estimate of HRTs and numbers of disc are considerable whereas linear and quadratic estimates of number of discs are highly significant, which evidence the significance of time and discs. However, as p-value is greater than 0.05, hence quadratic estimate of HRT is not significant. By using coefficients of the table the regression equation is Removal = - 79.995 + 6.88 time + 2.90 disc, where the sample standard deviation is 7.151, coefficient of correlation is 0.86 and coefficient of determination is 0.742. Distributions of errors are approximately normal as probability plot of the residuals is approximately linear. Residual analysis shows that against each predicted variable, residuals plot falls approximately in a horizontal band symmetric and centered about the horizontal axis and against predicted y-values. Moreover, Residual plot shows the constant standard deviations and linearity assumptions appear to be met.

7

Authors: Faheem Akhtar; Mansoor Ahmed; Muhammad Naeem Akhtar

The quality of water is of the utmost importance and vital concern for the human beings since it has a direct link with the human health and welfare. If the drinking water or tap water gets contaminated, it can result in severe health problems. For example, if the drinking water contains over the limit amount of fluoride then it can lead to bone deterioration and other bone related problems. The purpose of the present study is to carry out quality analysis of drinking and tap water in Nawabshah City. The analyzed parameters are pH, TDS, Total Alkalinity, Total Hardness, Calcium Hardness and Electrical Conductivity. World Health Organization (WHO) standards are followed in the present study. Total 18 drinking water and tap water samples were collected from 6 different locations in Nawabshah City. The parameters that appeared to be within the limits are PH and total alkalinity whereas TDS, total hardness, calcium hardness and electrical conductivity crossed WHO standard limits at some locations.

8

Authors: Kamran Shah; Hassan Khurshid; Izhar Ul Haq; Shaukat Ali Shah; Zeeshan Ali

In manufacturing or production setup, maintenance cost is one of the major portions of overall operating expenditure. It can vary between 15 to 60 percentage of overall cost for various industries including food related industries, iron, steel and other heavy industries. Such a high cost directly impacts manufacturing setup, profitability and sustainability in long run. In most of the industries, ineffective maintenance management can result in loss of capital and inefficient human resource deployment. This in turn affects the plants’ ability to manufacture quality products that are competitive in the market. Various maintenance management strategies including Operate to Failure (OTF), Design Out Maintenance (DOM), Skill Level Upgrade (SLU), Condition Based Monitoring (CBM) and Fixed Time Maintenance (FTM) are used in industries for maximizing productivity. In recent years, Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) has become an integral part of most of the industries so its importance and characteristics cannot be understated. While CMMS cannot live standalone, it requires some decision-making techniques to be equipped with. These techniques range from Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) to Decision Making Grid (DMG). In this paper, concept of DMG has been applied to an automotive parts Manufacturing Industry in conjunction with Weibull analysis. Parallels are drawn between the results of DMG and Weibull analysis.

9

Authors: Abdul Waheed; Nizamud Din; Arif Iqbal Umar; Riaz Ullah; Noor Ul Amin

To make the electoral process more secure, comfortable, and universal, it is essential to use modern cryptographic techniques for ensuring the anonymity of information in the electronic voting system. In many emerging applications like electronic voting data anonymity as well as un-traceability are the most essential security properties. To ensure these properties we present here in this paper a more secure and comparatively efficient blind signcryption scheme using the Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem (ECC). The existing e-voting schemes are based on El-Gamal and the Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) cryptosystems which are not only expensive approaches but also lack the security features like unlinkability and forward secrecy. In our proposed scheme we use a low-cost elliptic curve cryptosystem with 160 bits key as compared to El-Gamal 2048 bits key and RSA 1024 bits key. In this scheme signer signs the message blindly without knowing the original contents then the voter forward signcrypted vote to polling server. The polling server is the actual voter data verifier or validator. The polling server checks the validity/authenticity of the voter and has the right to accept or reject the vote. Moreover, this scheme offers forward secrecy, unlinkability, and non-repudiation in addition to the basic security features like confidentiality, authenticity, integrity, and unforgeability. Overall performance evaluation proves that our scheme is comparatively more efficient in terms of computational and communicational costs. Furthermore, this scheme is suitable for the e-voting system due to its lower cost and extra security features.

9

Authors: Sohail Muhammad; Humair Ahmed Siddiqui; Muhammad Ishaque Abro; Adil Usmani; Muhammad Amjad Anwar Mallick

Cement mortar, which is one of the most useful materials for construction applications, can deteriorate its performance by developing cracks. In order to cope with this issue, the materials’ scientist came forward with a unique biogeochemical phenomenon in which cement mortar can selfheal its crack autonomously using calcium carbonate precipitating bacteria and their feed. In this research, it was intended to study the separate and combined effect of Bacillus Subtilis (bacteria) and Calcium Lactate (feed) on the properties of conventional mortar. Cement mortars were made using conventional method and cast in the form of cylinders. Four types of samples were taken. Sample-N contains only cement and sand, Sample-B was made by addition of bacteria Bacillus Subtilis with sand and cement, Sample-C contains Calcium Lactate which is usually used as feed for Bacteria while the last sample ‘BC’ have both Bacteria as well as Calcium Lactate. The samples were observed up to 44 days for their surface characteristics and compressive strength. The Sample-N and B did not show any remarkable change in their surface appearance with respect to curing time. Sample-C and BC did show the precipitation of CaCO3 but the Sample-C precipitation was stopped soon while for Sample-BC, the precipitation was continued for a longer time. The Sample-BC showed the highest compressive strength (approximately 17.57 MPa), followed by Sample-N (approximately 13.32 MPa), Sample-B (approximately 11.04 MPa) while Sample-C displayed lowest strength (approximately 2.75 MPa). This gives an idea that Calcium Lactate which acts as feed for bacteria has the negative effect on the strength if not consumed and converted into CaCO3.

11

Authors: Muhammad Hamza; Syed Mashhad M. Geelani; Qamar Nawaz; Asif Kabir; Isma Hamid

The Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged as a new paradigm, and billions of devices are connected with the internet. IoT is being penetrated in major domains of daily life like health care, agriculture, industry, smart homes and monitoring of the environment. The operator of such complex, huge and diverse heterogeneous networks may not even be fully aware of their IoT devices working, activity, behavior and resource utilization etc. The efficient management of IoT devices becomes a challenge for network managers to ensure smooth network operation. Network traffic analysis of IoT devices is a necessary and rudimentary tool to understand the behavior of devices. In this paper firstly, we identify insights of device network traffic, discuss the activity patterns of some IoT devices and present a visual description of the pattern of IoT devices. Secondly, after analyzing the device's behavior, we build and demonstrate a profile of each device based on its activity cycle and traffic patterns information. Thirdly, the K-Means clustering algorithm is used to make clusters of IoT devices using their profile information. The clustering algorithm groups similar devices in a single group. The obtained results clearly describe the patterns of devices which help the network managers to make appropriate network policies for efficient secure network management.

12

Authors: Umair Khadim; Muhammad Munwar Iqbal; Muhammad Awais Azam

Digital text is the most frequent interchange form of data that could hold sensitive information such as audit firms, banks, and educational institutes. This sensitive information needs to preserve its integrity and originality so that it could not only secure the data but also helps to identify ownership of text documents. This paper presents a novel and invisible digital watermarking approach for the secure exchange of text documents over the internet. Digital watermarking serves from the last decade for detection of forgery and tempering from digital text documents and maintained the copyright and authentication successfully. Many states of the art watermark techniques achieve high imperceptibility, robustness, and high hidden capacity; unfortunately failed to maintain the balance among these three conflicting parameters. As resolvent, we propose an intelligent Three-Level Digital Watermarking (3LDW) system for text documents copyright protection. 3LDW system can be applied to Microsoft Word objects, document open spaces, and text feature coding without affecting the content of the original document. Experimental results reveal that our proposed 3LDW system strongly resist against formatting attacks and efficiently preserves the imperceptibility. Additionally, embedding capacity analysis demonstrates a prominent improvement of the proposed system as compared to other similar approaches.

12

Authors: Rabia Noreen Gul1a, Aftab Ahmad; Saqib Fayyaz; Muhammad Kashif Sattar; Syed Saddam ul Haq

This paper presents the solution of highly complex, non-linear, multi-objective Dynamic Combined Economic Emission Dispatch (DCEED) problem. DCEED is a power system optimization problem with conflicting objectives of fuel cost and emission. DCEED includes constraints like valve point loading effect, Transmission Losses and Ramp Rate limits. Solution of DCEED problem is given by a novel Hybridized Flower Pollination Algorithm (FPA) with Sequential Quadratic Programming (SQP). FPA is a nature inspired population based meta-heuristic optimization technique that models its search on the flower pollination process. The non-convex nature of generation because of numerous operational, physical and dynamic constraints, makes search space highly multi model and complex. This makes DCEED a challenging as well as an attractive problem for research. The effectiveness of FPA-SQP is tested and validated by applying it on IEEE Standard 5-unit and 10- unit non-convex test system in MATLAB environment for the time interval of 24 hours. The results achieved by this algorithm show significant reduction in cost and emission as compared to other available techniques in the literature.

14

Authors: Sumera Ahmad; Suraya Miskon

Textile and Apparel (T&A) industry is the backbone of Pakistani economy, including one-fourth of the industrial sector, and comprises 40% of industrial employees and approximately 60% share of Pakistani exports. Although, industry is striving hard to compete in international market; a persistent stream of innovation is required to maintain its due share in recent quota free global trade of textiles. Business Intelligence (BI) system is one of the most-used buzzwords in the modern business landscape for well informed decision making. In spite of the great synergies and benefits, BI system grant to the businesses and organizations. The adoption level is low with high failure ratio, especially in developing countries. Further, researchers did not propose any theory or model for the T & A industry. This study aims to fill this gap by conducting a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) for identifying the most appropriate factors, theory and model for the current study. Total of 75 studies were selected which were published during the period of 2011- 2020. A conceptual model is developed with most potential factors by using Technology-Organization Environment (TOE) framework. This conceptual model will guide the policy makers and industry practitioners to integrate and adopt the BI system successfully that would helpful to achieve competitive edge in the international business markets.

16

Authors: Caroline A. Sobo; Sadia Farooq; Salman Azhar

Concrete, a material that can be used as a building material and at the same time when mixed with light source, can enhance the beauty of a space as well as open new ways to experiment with it. The vision behind the research is to contribute with the manufacturers who are having “vision of cities that glow from within” through the use of concrete embedded with optic fiber strands. The aim of this research is to determine light transmitting properties of translucent concrete embedded with plastic fiber optics. In this experimental study, the amount of light is calculated that is able to transmit through the concrete. The four concrete blocks of equal size but different in amounts of plastic fiber optic strands are made. The research concluded that the fiber optics has the good light guiding properties which allow light to pass through the concrete in sufficient amount. The concrete with plastic fiber optics is named as translucent concrete, provides endless varieties of applications, not only aesthetically pleasing, but it can also promote safety, privacy and security as well as integrate the idea of saving green energy in the construction industry.