Engineering International

9-17

Authors: Muhammad Aamir khan; M. Rahman; M. Hanif; Muhammad Israr; S. Fahad Shah

A high performance solar collector was developed to modify agricultural building environment such as dairy, poultry farm buildings and greenhouses. Moreover it should be efficiently utilized as a solar dryer for drying various agricultural products and by products. The materials used include steel sheet with high performance of reflecting light, absorber tube, and angle iron and fully insulated drying chamber. A CPTSC was a tilted at 340south (Equivalent to the latitude of Peshawar) Pakistan. A CPTSC a total reflecting surface area was 2.9 m2 respectively. The absorber tube having a surface of 0.376 m2 was fixed in front of the reflector at the distance equal to the focal length. The total volume of drying chamber was 0.3135 m3. An experiment was conducted to enhance the efficiency of the CPTSC and two air mass flow rate treatments were tested with normal and convective mass air flow rate, 0.6 kg. Min-1 and 1.72 kg. Min-1 under the average temperature of the month (January, February and March, 2012). Moreover, the process was replicated three times under the completely randomized design. The result showed that both air mass flow rate and average temperature of the month significantly effected the efficiency of a concentrating parabolic trough solar collector. The new model of a CPTSC increased the efficiency from 8 to 25 % with increase in both air mass flow rates and average temperature of the months. Therefore it is concluded that the solar collector efficiency increased with increasing air mass flow rate.

27-38

Authors: M. Venkateswarlu; G.V. Ramana Reddy; D.V.Lakshmi

In this paper, the study of the steady two-dimensional flow of an incompressible viscous fluid with heat and mass transfer and MHD heat generation past a moving vertical plate with suction in the presence of viscous dissipation and chemical reaction is investigated. Using similarity variables, the governing partial differential equations are transformed into non-linear ordinary differential equations. These equations are then solved numerically using fourth order Runge-Kutta method with shooting technique. The flow variables are presented graphically. The graphs showed that velocity rises for increasing Grashof number, mass Grashof numer, suction, heat generation and Eckert number while reducing with increasing magnetic parameter, Schmidt number, and chemical reaction parameter and Prandtl number. Comparisons with previously published work are performed and are found to be in an excellent agreement.

49-61

Authors: Stephen Waithaka Titus; Tom Kimani Mburu; Julius Korir; Stephen Muathe

Kenya government, in collaboration with other stakeholders involved in enhancing teaching and research in the learning institutions have constructed a terrestrial fiber-optic network that connects most institutions of higher learning to enable them integrate their facilities for the purpose of sharing resources. Despite these efforts, adoption of Inter-Organization Information Systems (IOIS) by universities in Kenya is far from being realized. This creates the need of finding out the relationship between the IOIS technological factors and the IOIS adoption. This study filled this gap by analyzing IOIS technological determinants of IOIS adopting in the universities in Kenya, given the mixed results from empirical evidence on IOIS adoption generally. A logit regression procedure was used to analyze the collected data. Two factors were found to hinder the IOIS adoption, while one factor was found to motivate IOIS adoption.