Identifying and addressing barriers to renewable energy development in Pakistan

To ensure a sustainable energy future for Pakistan, it is necessary that the energy sector be accorded a high priority. Pakistan remains predominantly reliant on fossil fuels as its primary source of energy. Efforts to reduce reliance on fossil fuels through increasing the share of renewable energy in the energy supply systems have met with little success so far. The barriers to development of renewable energy can be broadly classified as policy and regulatory barriers, institutional barriers, fiscal and financial barriers, market-related barriers, technological barriers and information and social barriers. In this article, an effort has been made to identify the barriers that limit the use of renewable energy technologies in general and with specific reference to Pakistan, and outline the measures to address these barriers.     

On the verification of the effect of water depth on the performance of basin type solar stills

Many experimental and numerical studies have been done on different configurations of solar stills to optimize the design by examining the effect of climatic, operational and design parameters on its performance. The majority of the investigators presented their results in scatter diagrams rather than correlations. One of the most important of the operational parameters that has received a considerable attention in the literature is the brine depth. A good number of the investigations on the effect of brine depth are cited in this study. For each of these studies, a correlation was developed from the data reported by each study. A concluding correlation from all brine depth data was developed. The correlation showed a decreasing trend in the productivity with the increase in the brine depth. An experimental study was subsequently conducted to verify this trend by an experimental investigation on a solar still that was constructed and tested with five different brine depths, namely 1, 4, 6, 8 and 10 cm. The present study validated the decreasing trend in productivity with the increase of brine depth and showed that the still productivity could be influenced by the brine depth by up to 48%.     

Prussian Blue electrodeposition within an oriented mesoporous silica film: preliminary observations

Prussian Blue (PB) has been electrochemically grown through thin mesoporous silica films of novel generation, exhibiting regular arrays of hexagonally packed mesopores channels (3 nm in diameter) oriented perpendicular to the underlying electrode surface. Due to confinement effects, special care has to be taken to ensure effective permeability of PB precursors through the hard silica template, which was best achieved by pulsed electrodeposition from a high ionic strength medium (2 M KCl). Energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy associated to electron microscopy was used to evidence the presence of PB in the vertically-aligned mesopores, which was also assessed by their electrocatalytic behavior towards H₂O₂ reduction.     

Study the Influence of the Bank Energy on the Dynamical Pinch in Plasma Focus

The plasma focus discharge can generate, accelerate and pinch the plasma up to high density and temperature in a pulsed mode manner. Applications aspects of discharge require high efficiency of the fusion products. This situation acquires optimized operational parameters for the proper discharge. In this article, we have studied the plasma parameters and neutron performance dependency on bank energy. First, analytical expressions are derived from the equation of motion for the plasma particles in the radial phase. Then, the related fusion neutrons, both thermal and non-thermal, together with the discharge anisotropy in the low pressure regimes for the ‘Dena’ plasma focus device as function of bank energy are presented. The analytic models are compared with experimental data.     

A Novel Optical Technique Based on Image Processing for Determination of Tokamak Plasma Displacement

Plasma displacement is one of the main problems of tokamak plasma equilibrium. Control of plasma displacement has important role in plasma confinement and to achieve optimized tokamak plasma operation. In this contribution we presented a navel and simple optical technique for determination of tokamak plasma column displacement. For this purpose, an image processing technique used for the output signal of CCD camera and then plasma emission intensity profile and plasma position obtained.     

Cellular neural network to the spherical harmonics approximation of neutron transport equation in x–y geometry. Part I: Modeling and verification for time-independent solution

This paper describes a novel method based on using cellular neural networks (CNN) coupled with spherical harmonics method (P_N) to solve the time-independent neutron transport equation in x–y geometry. To achieve this, an equivalent electrical circuit based on second-order form of neutron transport equation and relevant boundary conditions is obtained using CNN method. We use the CNN model to simulate spatial response of scalar flux distribution in the steady state condition for different order of spherical harmonics approximations. The accuracy, stability, and capabilities of CNN model are examined in 2D Cartesian geometry for fixed source and criticality problems.