Volume 6, Issue 4

Electricity nowadays is one of the most important things in people’s life. However, there is a huge number of people in many regions who can’t have access to electricity. Recently Thermo-Electric Generators (TEG) showed the potential to provide the basic amount of electricity for lighting, charging mobile and operating radios. A JUST thermoelectric stove was tested in a previous work and not only showed a potential in producing electricity from biomass, but also could be used in cooking and heating water by utilizing the heat in the stack. This work tries to improve the efficiency of electricity production using the same stove. For this purpose, different base plate materials were compared to determine the most efficient plate in terms of heat transfer. A TEG assembly was connected on one side to the hot plate and a heat sink on the other side and the power output was measured and stored into a battery. The fuels used in this work were wood, manure, and peat which are available in deprived areas, and the plates were Aluminum, Galvanized Steel, Cast Iron and Copper (Bronze). As experiments showed, Aluminum was the best plate material to transfer the heat to the hot side of the TEGs. The maximum matched power obtained from TEGs was about 1.05W, 0.95W, 0.71W and 0.46W for Aluminum, Galvanized Steel, Cast Iron and Copper (Bronze) respectively, with wood as fuel.

In this work, propose a rough design of a horizontal-axis wind turbine to be installed in the planned wind farm in Dhofar, Oman with an expected electricity generation of 2 MW. We studied the wind atlas of Oman and from which we determined the maximum possible mean wind speed in the entire Sultanate and built our design based on that reference value, which is 6 m/s (equivalent to 21.6 km/h). We then looked at some commercial designs of winds turbines from different international manufacturers to have a guideline about the limits or recommended values for the design variables we should select. After this, we applied a set of equations that estimate the power output from the wind turbine rotor and match the target electric power to the design variables using a MATLAB code. After trying different values, we found a suitable design and we presented the distribution of the blade angle (twist angle), and the power distribution per unit span along the rotor blade. The rotor design has 3 blades with a diameter of 70 m and a rotational speed of 24 rpm. The designed rotor gives 2.37 MW of output power, which is more than the target of 2 MW, allowing for about 15% of power losses in the gearbox and generator.

Authors present new clustering-based algorithms for detection of geologic anomalies and results of their testing on the data containing anomalies of two types: (a) high permeability anomaly with regular records containing smaller permeability values, and (b) gas-filled sand anomaly with regular records containing data from brine-filled sands. Results of algorithms testing, presented in the paper, demonstrate high stability of anomaly detection with false discovery rate below 20% and with the true discovery rate exceeding 73%.

With its non-polluting nature, unlimited free supply and worldwide availability, solar energy is a most attractive non-conventional energy source. The solar energy is used for cooking, heating, lighting, pumping, electricity generation, etc. Solar cooking is the effortless, secure and most suitable way to cook food without consuming fuels. So, many countries in the world are using different types of solar cooker. Generally, solar cooker consumes more time to cook food compared to other conventional cooking devices. In this paper, the performance of box type solar cooker is investigated using various materials to increase heat retaining capacity of the cooker and hence to minimize cooking time. Readings of temperature vs. time were taken by placing different materials like black sand, brown sand, marbles, salt, small rocks, abrus and pebbles at the base of the solar cooker. From this analysis, it was found that marbles achieve a maximum temperature of 207.8 °C in 180 min which can be helpful in reducing the time for cooking.