Advances in Engineering and Technology: An International Journal

The Fifth Generation Fixed Network (F5G): Full-Fiber Access Embracing the Gigabit Era

Chandra Bhushan Sah, Prabha Shastri, Babu R. Dawadi — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The rapid rise of the digital economy is aided by the new generation of information networks. Optical Fiber networks are foundation stone of cost-effective sustainable mode of communication of our society by leveraging high bandwidth, low latency, reliability, security, stability, enabling long-term economic growth through cutting-edge services and applications for industries, business and users. F5G intends to lay the groundwork for a systematic structure to the growth of fixed networks, including generational planning and pushing the technology's innovations and expansion into as many industries as feasible through Fiber-To-The-Everywhere-and-Everything. Fixed networks have become a crucial public infrastructure in the growing global digitization process, and their development level is an essential metric for evaluating a country's overall strength. This article introduces the trend for F5G networks along with recommendations for their development.

Future Sediment Transport Ability and its Consequences in the Urbanized River Basin

Suraj Lamichhane, Nirajan Devkota — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The urbanization process of the Kathmandu Valley has a significant impact on LULC change, river runoff, and sediment transport capability. The historical sediment flow pattern indicates that the sediment transport capacity of the basin has increased even when precipitation and river discharge decreased. So, the sediment regression model is developed in this study in relation to discharge, precipitation, and built-up area change. Model parameters are calibrated and validated through the measured sediment discharge of the basin and the performance of the model is evaluated through NSE, PBIAS, and R2. In the future, the sediment transport capacity of the channel is projected for average monthly, maximum, and minimum flow conditions by +4.33%, +6%, and -2.66% respectively per decade due to the rise in the urban area (+6% per decade). Increasing the rigid ground surface through urbanization reduces the sediment generation through the watershed and balances the sediment transport capability, excess erosion is produced in the river channel causing a change in the river morphology. The findings of this study will be useful for planning and management of the river basin and the river structures.

Relationship between Uniaxial Compressive Strength and Powder Factor of Marble at Selected Deposits

K. J. Olatunji, I. A. Ajadi, S. M. Akanbi, A. Afolabi, M. A. Bolanta — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The study was carried out to determine how the Powder Factors of marble in selected sites in Kwara and Oyo States, Nigeria i.e., Eleja Marble deposit, Oreke Marble deposit and Morlap Marble deposit, Igbetti are influenced by Uniaxial Compressive Strength, and tensile strength of the rocks. The Geographical co-ordinates of the sites and depth of the drilled holes were taken and recorded, the area of each of the sites were also determined using Auto CAD software. The fresh samples of marble from the sites were taken to laboratory where Schmidt value, bulk density tests, and Uniaxial Compressive Strength (UCS) were determined. The UCS for Oreke was 100 MPa, Eleja 110 MPa, while Igbetti A and B are 95 MPa and 110 MPa respectively. The Tensile Strength for Oreke was 0.01485 MPa, Eleja 0.0123MPa, while Igbetti A and B were 0.01125 MPa and 0.00705 MPa respectively. The sites were subjected to similar drilling patterns. A graph was plotted to determine the relationship between the Powder Factor and Uniaxial Compressive Strength. The relationship between Uniaxial Compressive Strength and Powder Factor was Linear with correlation of about 0.8.

A Pilot Study on the Effect of Daylighting and Orientation in the Office Building: A Case of Kathmandu

Bimala Basnet, Sanjaya Uprety — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Illuminance results in visibility of objects and daylighting is the major source of light for perceiving and carrying out certain function. Office blocks hold the space for people to perform economic task for 7-8 hours daily and humans seek comfort. Lighting the interior is a mindful job, as the space can be over lit or under lit resulting in visual discomfort and high use of energy to maintain human comfort. Quality and quantity of natural light in the indoor is guided by several factors such as climate, latitude, sky condition, site obstructions, orientation, opening design, surface reflectivity, space function etc. The study shows that the best orientation for Kathmandu is 175°N and for the building with window wall ratio greater than 60%, orientation does not play a vital role. Autodesk Ecotect 2011, has been used to simulate the building with the real case scenario in the urban context for the outmost result. The finding adds value during the early design phase and also to prepare guidelines, policies and bylaws relating to wellbeing of occupant for visually and functionally friendly interior.

Impact of Climate Change on Crop Water Requirement in Kamala River Basin of Nepal

Sarita Dawadi, Yogendra Mishra, Manoj Lamichhane, Jebin Tamrakar — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The future climate which has crucial role of any hydrological events that occurs within basin will have more uncertainty. Changing the climatic variables, the water balance of the basin will more unpredictable. Not only will climatic parameter changes but also adversely affected the water management within the basin. In this study, an attempt has been carried out to compare the future River flow of Kamala basin and future water demand of Kamala irrigation command area. The CROPWAT and AQUACROP model, based on climatic, soil and crop data, was used to estimate the future Crop Water Requirement (CWR), Irrigation Water Requirement (IWR) and Biomass yield. The hydrological station, because not exist within basin, was not possible to simulate the future river flow of the Kamala basin using any hydrological model. Therefore, the WECS method is simply used to forecast the future monthly flow of Kamala River. The two emission scenarios, ssp245 and ssp585 were conducted based on cropping intensity 170% and 300 % and IWD for each sub-scenario over 12 months was estimated. For the first sixth months, IWR is increased in the future period as maximum and minimum temperature increases and the IWR for monsoon season is less required due to increases in precipitation and again for the post-monsoon season, IWR is increased compared as historical IWR. The highest irrigation water requirement occurs in March month under ssp245 and ssp585 and CI 300%. Whereas, July and August months have the lowest irrigation water demand under ssp245 and ssp585 scenarios. Based on the finding, the production of crop with irrigation system has higher than rainfed system. For paddy, the rainfed system produced dry yield of 6.58 ton/ha whereas, dry yield of irrigated field has 7.05 ton/ha. The future river flow is insufficient to meet the irrigation water demand in first five months in near future under both ssp245 and ssp585 scenarios. The magnitude of deficiency in ssp585 is comparatively higher than in ssp245. As a result, all of these findings suggest that the crop water
requirement of KIP is insufficient in the future to provide a year-round irrigation system.

Road Maintenance Practices in Nepal: A Case Study of Malekhu – Mugling Road Section

Archita Dawadi, Santosh Kumar Shrestha, Om Prakash Giri — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Road degradation is a major issue in Nepal due to main focus only on backlog maintenance and upgradation which evidently is an unsuccessful maintenance investment strategy worldwide. Considering global success of PBMC in time-cost-quality spectrum, it has been implemented in Nepal since 2003 but without success. Thus, ADB in 2016 revised PBM specifications and re-executed it, whose performance potential must be accessed with respect to current SMDP practice. The current study analyzes and compares effectiveness of SMDP and PBMC in terms of cost and quality for Malekhu- Mugling road section, and suggests a suitable maintenance practice in the current scenario of Nepal. This study reveals that strengthening SMDP practice shall be focused on before releasing a long term PBMC. The study concludes that the most suitable practice in terms of cost quality optimization is a strengthened SMDP as per PBMC standard whereby length worker perform PBMC standard routine, pavement and intervention based repairs due to their reliability during emergency. Then, one year contract shall be released incorporating two recurrent (prior and post monsoon) and a specific contract where contractors essentially follow performance based maintenance of roadside structures, traffic safety, pavement defects if any, and any emergency maintenance during monsoon. It is recommended that PBMC model shall be developed gradually from one year contract to multiyear contracts since there may be high chances of claims and conflicts in four year long PBMC.

Seismic Fragility Assessment of Irregular High Rise Buildings using Incremental Dynamic Analysis

Avinash Bhandari, Rajan Suwal, Aakarsha Khawas — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The construction of high rise buildings is common in city areas. These buildings may be irregular because of aesthetics or other requirements. As Nepal lies in a seismically active region these irregular high rise buildings may not perform well during earthquakes. Two existing irregular high rise buildings are taken as case study buildings that had pre-existing torsion. Shear walls are added to the building at the required location to minimize torsion in the buildings. The objective of the study is to determine the performance of building with and without torsional irregularity. The seismic performance of all the buildings is carried out by taking seven pairs of ground motions using nonlinear time history analysis. These ground motions are scaled to the required intensity to develop incremental dynamic analysis (IDA) curve. These IDA curves are used to develop fragility curves to access the performance in the buildings. The result from the analysis showed that performance in one building improved by 35% and in another by 70% at the peak ground acceleration (PGA) of 0.35g.

Implementing Autonomous Driving System in a Virtual Environment

Chitran Pokhrel, Aayush Khatiwada — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The automation in the current times has become the growing hot topic for discussion around the globe. The growth of the machine learning and the development of new techniques have made the automation one of the major topics of research among the scientist around the world. It might be too costly to observe the accuracy and precision of the algorithm in the real world; hence the virtual environments are used to test the algorithms before the real world tests with the technique are done. This work focuses on one of the various ways of developing the autonomous driving system using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) in a gaming environment.

Simulation of Propeller Runner for Cylindrical Basin of Gravitational Water Vortex Power Plant

Shankar Nath Pandey, Raj Kumar Chaulagain, Bimal Pandey — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The gravitational water vortex power plant is an emerging technology of power generation from water vortex in a small amount. It can generate electricity in a low head of range (0.7-2m). This system is very simple and requires less keep-up. This research aims to develop the propeller type runner which gives optimum efficiency and cylindrical basin suitable for this propeller runner in GWVPP. The research has been conducted by developing a new propeller runner and cylindrical basin considering the top surface open as the atmosphere. Blade angle, discharge hole diameter of the basin, the position of runner, and rpm are optimized on CFD-based optimization. After the CFD analysis, the optimum blade angle was 43º, exit hole diameter of this basin was found 175 mm which is 20% of the basin diameter. The optimum height was found 785mm which is 65.42% of the total height. And the efficiency of the optimized system was 23.639 % at 40 rpm.

Reassessing the Building Construction System and Quality Issues in Relocated Settlement after the Gorkha Earthquake

Rabindra Adhikari — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This paper assesses the reconstruction process in a mountainous village that typically represents the dominant location of damage by the Gorkha earthquake of April 25, 2015. The pre- and post-earthquake scenarios are presented comparatively. The structural system is found to be mostly compliant as per the new guidelines set by the government; however, deficiencies in terms of construction system and structural characteristics were significant in the reconstruction. Thus, the reconstructed buildings with several deficiencies could be still seismically vulnerable. It is recommended that the performance of reconstructed buildings after the Gorkha earthquake shall be re-assessed for necessary risk management planning. Also, this study provides insight into the construction practice in after earthquake reconstruction and areas of poor workmanships in such work.

Development and Implementation of Portable Ultrasonic Sensor Circuit with USB Interface and Signal Processing to Detect Damages in the Mild Steel Structure

Manish Man Shrestha, Bibek Ropakheti, Uddhav Bhattarai, Amit Shakya — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Mild steel is one of the widely used structures for commercial use. In this paper, we present a PZT-based portable ultrasonic wave interfacing circuit with a USB interface to detect the damages in the mild steel structure. The designed circuit amplifies and shifts the level of the ultrasonic waves. The wave is then digitized by the microcontroller with a sampling rate of 2 MHz. The digitized wave is then transferred to the PC via USB communication. The CDC class was used in USB communication to generate a virtual com port and capture the data in real-time. The wave was then filtered and processed in the PC to detect damage to the structure. The dimension and weight of the used mild steel are 570mm x 205mm x 10mm and 10 kg respectively. To detect the damage to the structure, the 200 kHz tone-burst signal was induced in it through the PZT actuator. The ultrasonic wave was then captured in both intact and damaged conditions of the structure. The induced damage was of dimension 1mm x 10mm x 5mm. The RMS value of the captured wave in intact condition and the undamaged condition was calculated. This run-in of the RMS values in the intact and damaged condition of the structure solidifies the capability of the device to gather the ultrasonic wave correctly.