Journal of Lumbini Engineering College

Festival Induced Air Quality Perturbation over an Urban Center in Eastern Nepal

2022-11-09T11:26:10+00:00

An attempt has been made to investigate the changes in the characteristics of aerosol optical properties and a columnar load of carbon monoxide (CO) induced during the Dashain celebration 2018 over Birtamode, Nepal. Ground-based measurements of Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) were carried out using a Microtops II sun-photometer during 13^th to 25^th Oct, 2018. AOD values on days before Dashain were in the range of 0.6 which increased above 1 attaining a maximum value of 1.6 on 19^th. The AOD values started dropping below 1 on 24th, attaining a daily average of 0.64. The peak values on the respective days were also captured by Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) AOD retrievals. A similar pattern was observed with the TROPOspheric Measuring Instrument (TROPOMI) CO column with peak value on the 19^th. The air mass trajectories show that the increase in the AOD and CO values is of local origin and the CAMS GFAS wildfire flux of CO and PM2.5 show no change during the study period. However, the spatial analysis of AOD shows that the increased values are of regional nature. The results highlight the necessity of installation of low-cost air quality sensors in the region and utilization of aerosol and trace gaseous products derived from satellite remote sensing instruments at high temporal resolution and the application of chemical transport models.

Practices of Price Adjustment in Selected Construction Projects

2022-11-09T11:17:40+00:00

Price adjustment affects all the stakeholders i.e. client, consultant and contractor. This research reveals the trend of the cost of components of construction i.e. labor, material, fuel, equipment etc., compare the different formulas of price adjustment and understand the view of client, consultant and contractor regarding price adjustment. Ten contracts commencing within 2010 A.D to 2019 A.D have been chosen. The four contracts have used FIDIC formula, five have used PPMO formula and one has used small works formula. Trend of cost of labor, bitumen, fuel has been analyzed for contracts using FIDIC formula and the trend of NRB index of labor, material and equipment has been analyzed for contracts using PPMO formula. The formula used in the contracts have been compared with other formulas under same circumstance that original formula was used. Questionnaire was distributed to the client, contractor and consultant’s representative. On Contracts using FIDIC formula, the cost of labor can be predicted to increase in future. The cost of fuel and bitumen cannot be predicted as it is fluctuating with respect to time. Comparing the price adjustment factor using different formulas, it cannot be generalized that which formula could give minimum value of price adjustment.

Evaluation and Effectiveness of River Training Works with Special Focus on Tinau River in Rupandehi District of Nepal

2022-11-09T11:41:07+00:00

Flood in Tinau River is very common since past decades. It has damaged several houses, cultivated land and live stocks in the past and continues till the date. Hundreds of hectares of cultivated lands have been deposited with sand and debris making the land unsuitable for farming. The governments of Nepal and local bodies have been launching projects for flood control. Various types of structures were built in the past. Millions of Nepalese Rupees have been invested for river training works. However, the river training works is not functioning well. This study was conducted during the period from March 2019 to April 2020. The objective of this study is to evaluation the effectiveness of river training works with especial focus on Tinau River in Rupandehi district of Nepal. Field observation, in-depth interview, focus group discussion and questionnaire survey were the major tools used for the field investigation. The study found that the extraction of river bed materials and unmanaged catchment area are also the causes of the ineffectiveness of the river training works. It also includes lack of monitoring and supervision, socio-political pressure and lack of enforcement of law and policies. Similarly, some other causes are inadequate co-ordination between line agencies, inadequate plan and policies and lack of awareness are the minor causes of ineffective river training works. Furthermore, inadequate maintenance of built up structures, irresponsible of beneficiary group, unmanaged population growth at catchment area were also found causes behind sustainability of the river training works. The study would like to suggest that the river bed extraction should be conducted in a balanced way. And, hydrological, geological and geotechnical studies should be conducted in detail before design of the river training structures.

Hydraulic Analysis of Lekhnath Small Town Water Supply Distribution Network, Pokhara Metropolitan City, Nepal

2022-11-09T11:47:33+00:00

Water Distribution Network earlier will have challenge in fulfilling the growing need of water supply. Forecasting and monitoring the flow, pressure, demand, and quality of water in water distribution network are key requirement for sustainable and reliable water supply. Lekhnath city, due to the recent merger with the biggest metropolitan city of Nepal, Pokhara, has created the rapid growth of population resulting to haphazard pipeline extension in this area. For hydraulic analysis of Lekhnath Small Town Water Supply Distribution Network, one of the networks i.e., Shishuwakhudi distribution network was faced with problem analysis. This hydraulic analysis is a part of on-going doctoral research and Youth-led Initiative ‘drinkPani’ on ‘Water Supply and Quality Monitoring using Emerging Technologies’ where capacity building of Youth and Women through data-driven engagements (Water-informatics) is one of the core targets in the overall project-work package. The preliminary analysis of water quality was also derived from Young Water Volunteers (YWVs) under the research work on Youth-led Participatory Sensing (YPS) Model to enhance drinking water security of the study area. The Shishuwakhudi Water Distribution Network (WDN) supplies water to 1138 household at present and consisting of 41 junction nodes and 11.2km distribution pipeline distributing water from a reservoir. With field survey, households at each node of the network were determined. Demand driven analysis using EPANET was done to determine the pressure deficit at various nodes. Demand pattern based on design guideline was adopted for analysis. At present scenario, four nodes at end of the network showed negative pressure at peak hours (5 am- 7am). At other times, the pressure was above 10m head. Demand was forecasted for 10 years from now by projecting the household population based on growth rate of census 2011. When projected to future scenario, the existing pipeline showed only 17% reliability with a minimum pressure requirement of 10 m head as per norms of urban water supply project in Nepal. Genetic algorithm was used for optimization of the Shishuwakhudi Network with total cost of replacing pipes as an objective function with pressure constraint of minimum 10m head. With 500 generation of run, the optimal diameter for each pipe was obtained that gave optimal cost of NRs 4,21,50,917 (USD 359,690.64). This optimization helps in selecting the proper pipeline network for future expansion to fulfil the growing need of water demand.

Research by Geophysical Methods of Hydraulic Structures of Water Management Purpose

2022-11-09T11:57:50+00:00

Yield growth in the Southern Steppe is impossible without irrigation with the introduction of mineral and organic fertilizers, so the repair, restoration, and construction of new irrigation networks are one of the main tasks of regional and district water management. For the repair of water management networks, regulation of pools of irrigation systems it is necessary to use inexpensive effective methods of the establishment of their technical condition. Such methods are geophysical, which allow to identify the areas of filtration, flooding, violations of protective screens in the control pools of irrigation systems. The necessity of localization of areas of filtration water losses to concentrate repair and restoration works in the most disturbed zones is scientifically substantiated, which will significantly reduce the cost of time and money and increase the overall efficiency of the structure.

Cost Effectiveness and Quality Adequacy in Construction Project

2022-11-09T12:53:52+00:00

This article looked at the challenges of defining quality in the construction business, the potential benefits of executing quality, and the roadblocks to using quality in development. We use information gathered during contractor interviews as well as information from questionnaire surveys. Clients want better service quality, faster construction, and technological advancements. It's no coincidence that the building industry has turned to manufacturing as a source of inspiration and innovation. Total Quality Management (TQM Generation and Re-engineering) and other fabrication-based methodologies are being encouraged and integrated into the development process. Because of its excellence, it has made more progress than any other benefit industry. However, because of the requirement for standardization and the multiple stakeholders involved, implementing TQM standards in development is particularly difficult.

Anomaly-Based Network Intrusion Detection System

2022-11-09T12:59:42+00:00

Network security has been a really hot topic since the inception of the internet in the early ’80s. With millions of people entrusting their life savings in the hands of an organization, it is really necessary to keep the network intruders out of the system. The most alarming thing is that - even today, many organizations are detecting these intrusions through manual labour. Many researchers have proven that these intrusions have a certain pattern i.e. they can be detected with an Artificial Intelligence (AI) based system with enough training which can prove to be a really an effective substitute for manual labour. This paper explains the current trends in Network Intrusion Detection and the technologies that have been implemented to detect them. CICIDS2017 dataset containing around 3 million data points was used in this experiment. K-Nearest Neighbours (KNN) and Random Forest algorithms are used as the AI tools and their performance has also been compared.

Pneumonia of Chest X-Ray Images Detection using VGG Architectures

2022-11-09T13:12:00+00:00

Pneumonia is one of the world's most frequent diseases. Pneumonia, a serious respiratory infection, damages the lungs and makes it difficult to breathe. Chest X-ray scans are one of the most significant and common procedures for diagnosing pneumonia condition. An effective model for the identification of pneumonia based on digital chest X-ray pictures is proposed in this paper, which could help radiologists make better decisions. This is a supervised learning technique in which the proposed model predicts the outcome depending on the dataset's image quality. In this research, Kaggle dataset has been used to train the model. To improve training and validation accuracy, fine-tuning of Visual Geometry Group (VGG) pre-trained model are conducted with different hyperparameters. The deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) based VGG-16 and VGG-19 architectures are used to extract features from given chest X-ray images. These features are then used for classification. In addition to the accuracy and F1-score as an evaluation matrix, the results of pre-trained models are compared using the model loss, and model accuracy graphs. The model's performance in detecting pneumonia demonstrates that the proposed VGG pre-trained model can efficiently categorize normal and pneumonia chest X-rays images in practice. As a result, the proposed model can be utilized to make a speedy diagnosis of pneumonia and can assist radiologists with their work.

Fake News Stance Detection using Deep Neural Network

2022-11-09T13:25:39+00:00

With the advancement of technology, fake news is more widely exposed to users. Fake news may be found on the Internet, news sources and social media platforms. The spread of the fake news has harmed both individuals and society. The way to observe fake news using the stance detection technique is the focus of this paper. Given a set of news body and headline pairs, stance detection is the task of automatic detection of relationships among pieces of text. Pre-trained GloVe word embedding is used for the word to vector representation as it can capture the inter-word semantic information. The LSTM neural network had been shown efficient in deep learning applications because it can capture sequential information of input data. In this paper, it is found that the LSTM-based encoding decoding model using pre-trained GloVe word embedding achieved 93.69% accuracy on the FNC-1 dataset.

A Cost-Effective System of Renewable Micro Grid using Glowworm Swarm Optimization Algorithm

2022-11-09T13:38:44+00:00

Due to today's rapid socioeconomic expansion and environmental concerns, many modern civilizations are interested in researching alternate energy options, notably renewable ones. In this sense, a Micro-grid (MG) of multiple renewable energy sources can help achieve the intended goals while delivering electricity more efficiently, affordably, and safely. This paper presents an expert multi-objective Glowworm Swarm Optimization Algorithm (GSO) for optimal operation of a typical MG with Renewable Energy Sources (RESs). The objective is to minimize both the overall operating cost and the net emission. The proposed algorithm is tested on a typical MG, and its superior performance is compared to those from other evolutionary algorithms.

Effect of Mn Doping on the Electronic and Magnetic Properties of Full Heusler Alloy Co2FeSi

2022-11-09T13:59:51+00:00

Heusler compounds are one of the largest families of ternary intermetallics with broad range of applications. In this work, we inspected the electronic and magnetic properties of full Heusler alloy Co₂FeSi and the effect induced by doping Mn atom on those properties. We employed plane wave pseudo-potential method based on DFT framework implemented in Quantum ESPRESSO code using PBE type of functional for exchange correlation energy. The calculation demonstrates that Co₂FeSi exhibits metallic nature in the majority spin state and semi-conducting nature in minority spin state with indirect energy gap of ≈ 0.132 eV and shows chances of weakened half-metallicity as indicated by the presence of band gap below fermi level. The calculated total magnetic moment is 5.44 μ_B/cell which is found to be deviated from Slater-Pauling rule M = N_V − 24 for full Heusler compounds. The site selection for doping was based on the empirical rule for atomic occupation established for Heusler alloys and the calculation of formation energy. The calculation of formation energy at B and D site showed B site as more favorable for doping for both 25% and 50% concentration. At 25% Mn concentration, calculation shows Co₂FeSi has typical metallic behavior for spin-up electrons, but semi-conducting behavior with decreased gap below fermi level for spin-down electrons showing no half-metallicity whereas for 50% Mn concentration the gap gets broadened by 0.089645 eV. The calculated magnetic moment for 25% and 50% Mn doping is 21.93 μ_B/cell and 21.69 μ_B/cell respectively. Our calculation depicts that the chances of half-metallicity decreases for 25% concentration of Mn atom and increases for 50% Mn concentration.

Structural Identification of Cubic Aluminum and Non-Cubic Titanium using X-Ray Diffractometer

2022-11-09T14:08:36+00:00

The unknown crystalline samples like minerals, inorganic compounds etc. are identified mostly with the help of X-ray diffraction (XRD). More than 25 Nobel prizes have been awarded to the works based on it. The identification of the solids are essential for the research in various streams of science like Material, Environmental, Geo, Engineering and Biology. The XRD is based on Bragg’s law. The diffraction pattern obtained after passing the X-ray through interatomic slit is the main source of the structure. It was first demonstrated by Max von Laue (1912). The XRD is now attached with instrumental and computational tools. This paper focus on different steps for the indexing of an X-ray diffraction pattern, identifying the Bravais lattice, and calculating the lattice parameters of the cubic (Al) and non-cubic (Ti) system that are the starting elements we have used for the preparation of MXene. We have used the experimental and mathematical ways for the determinations of the intended structural values. The values obtained were in well agreement with the standard data.

Editorial Vol.4(1)

2022-11-09T11:06:12+00:00

No abstract available.

Foreword Vol.4(1)

2022-11-09T11:11:42+00:00

No abstract available.