Research Publications (Engineering and Built Environment)
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://ir-dev.dut.ac.za/handle/10321/215
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Item Comparative analysis of specific energy consumption and energy consumption benchmarking in galvanising plants(IEOM Society International, 2022-08-04) Dewa, MendonThe inadequacy of sustainable energy is endlessly posing major challenges globally. The issue of energy optimisation is indispensable for manufacturing sector, particularly for a hot-dip galvanising process where galvanising furnaces are the significant energy users. This study is aimed at comparative analysis of specific energy consumption and energy consumption benchmarking in four galvanising plants with the view to necessitate the identification of best practices. Energy baselines were used as quantitative reference points to compare energy performance indicators and quantify fluctuations in energy performance during the baseline and reporting periods. A quantitative analysis was also conducted to benchmark four galvanising facilities on factors that included the electricity/zinc ratio, electricity /dips ratio and product tonnage/zinc used ratio. The results revealed improved performance for plant 4 over time relative to the baseline consumption when compared to plants 1, 2 and 3. Plant 4 also outperformed other facilities after the energy efficiency interventions in terms of electricity/zinc ratio and electricity/ product tonnage ratio. Given the disparity between the results of specific energy consumption (SEC) for the four plants, it was concluded that SEC alone should not be used as an energy performance indicator.Item Energy-aware lightpath routing algorithm for optical transport networks(TELKOM, 2019-09-01) Gomba, Ndadzibaya Masimba; Nleya, Bakhe; Dewa, Mendon; Mutsvangwa, Andrew; Khumalo, Zephaniah PhilaniCurrent as well as future applications and services are characterized by bandwidth intensiveness and as such are directly driving the need for the deployment as well as operation of backbone networks that optimize on bandwidth provisioning. Since infrastructural hardware equipment requirements are trebling every two years because of continued surging bandwidth demands, the telecommunication industry is also a growing direct contributor to worldwide greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions as well as energy consumption. This is driving necessities to research on more energy efficient networking approaches. A novel optimized energy-aware lightpath routing (OEA-LR) algorithm is herein proposed. It primarily takes into account the effects of physical layer impairments (PLI) since their effects in high capacity translucent optical networks may not be ignored when formulating routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) algorithms. We assume an all-optical network hence connection requests from source to destination are entirely provisioned in the optical domain, thus optical-electrical-optical (OEO) conversions are not utilised. Both analytical and simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithm improves both energy efficiency operation as well as resource utilization of the network. We further conclude on a general observation of reciprocations between energy savings and blocking performance.