The rate of electrification in rural areas in Zambia is very low, currently standing at less than 5% despite having abundant flowing water resources. Hydrokinetic technology is an alternative among other promising technologies for rural area electrification because of availability of abundant flowing Rivers and low population in rural settlement. In this paper, the author designed and numerically simulated a circular arc blade hydrokinetic turbine system. The design power for the horizontal axis hydrokinetic turbine was 3 kW at water velocity of 3 m/s with the tip speed ratio of 2.5, angle of attack of 10 degrees and power coefficient of 0.4. In this work, a numerical simulation was employed to characterize and develop the horizontal axis hydrokinetic turbine. The prototype circular arc blade horizontal axis hydrokinetic turbine was tested in one of stream in Zambia and the results were compared with the numerical simulation results.
Insolation models have been recognized for many years in solar energy systems as important tools to determine radiations for locations lacking insolation data base. Unfortunately, for most geographical areas in Zambia, the insolation data is not available. Correlations between the daily measurements of global solar radiation and the meteorological parameters were presented in tabular form for the selected locations. A common relationship to estimate global solar radiation for the all Zambia is also established. The values of correlation coefficients established varied from 53% to 97% and the errors of estimation were between 0.24 and 0.0.84.
The purpose of this work was to show that kiva4 is more accurate than ki-va3vr2 under different ignition timings. The numerical accuracy of kiva4 was compared with the numerical results obtained by other researchers who used kiva3vr2 as the simulation code. The combustion characteristics of gasoline under different ignition timings are obtained using the kiva4 code. For achieving this, two cases were investigated; a complete engine cycle was successfully simulated using a four-valve pent-roof engine and a comparison was made with experimental results by other researchers. At a constant speed of 600 rpm, a BASF (Badische Anilin-und Soda Fabrik) octane rating engine-single cylinder was used where ignition timing was changed in the range of 4˚ BTDC to 18˚ BTDC. Kiva4 generates more accurate results than ki-va3vr2. The experimental results were more in agreement with kiva4 than ki-va3vr2 results. The average temperature and pressure in kiva4 were 640 K and 16.48 bars while in kiva3vr2 were 600 K and 14.83 bars, the peak temperature and pressure in kiva4 were 2316.3 K and 21.5 bars while in kiva3vr2 were 2171.5 K and 19.4 bars. The peak temperature and pressure increase with increasing spark advance until the most favorable instant time is determined. Best performance was achieved when the ignition time was set to 10 degrees before top dead center.
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