This work presents the synthesis of activated carbon, a very important material with lots of use cases in textile, food industries and even in energy storage as an electrode material in supercapacitor development. Abundantly available cassava peels was used as a raw material for the production of the activated carbon by adopting the chemical activation approach which utilized KOH as activating agent. The activation was carried out at 8000C in a tubular furnace. Scanning electron micrographs (SEM) showed that a highly porous carbon structure was achieved with high specific surface area of 828m2g-1as evident from the BET results. Raman spectrophotometer analysis showed that the prepared activated carbon was highly graphitized as seen from the G peak. The existence of mesopores and micropores was confirmed by the N2 adsorption/desorption analysis which also revealed the presence of a hysteris loop and a P/P0=0.45 value.
TiO2 is vastly used in several industries due to its several properties, its wide bandgap and poor ionic conductivity has however hampered its application in the energy industry. In this work, TiO2 has been doped with MnO2 to produce thin films. The doping was carried out in 5, 10 and 15 wt% of MnO2 and the resultant films characterized (uv/vis photospectroscopy and 4-point probe conductivity test). It was observed that the electrical conductivity was highly improved as was observed in the conductivity test which showed the conductivity of pure TiO2 at 0.0100Ω-1m-1, increase to 0.0217 Ω-1m-1 at 5wt% of MnO2 , and to 0.0409Ω-1m-1 at 10wt% and finally to 0.0749wt Ω-1m-1 at 15wt% of MnO2. The improvement in the conducting properties were also made evident by the drastic reduction in the bandgap energy of TiO2 which reduced for 3.2eV of pure TiO2 to 2.7eV, 2.2eV and 1.7eV for 5wt%, 10wt% and 15wt% MnO2 respectively. These bandgap values were obtained from kebulka-monk plots made by the reflectance readings of the UV/VIS.
Effective solar projects require effective solar data collection, however with the high cost of pyranometers in the market, there arose the need to construct a low-cost device for the purpose of solar radiation measurements. A device was thus developed in the University of Port Harcourt, River’s state, Nigeria by utilizing a photodiode, a thermistor, a lcd among other readily available components. Using a reference pyranometer for calibration, the device was able to deliver a mean global solar radiation value of 16.00MJ/m2/day, while the maximum value obtained during the test period was 20.70MJ/m2/day. The performance of the locally developed device compares and competes favourably with what is available in the market.
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