Among various pollutants, wastewater consists of toxic or carcinogenic heavy metals such as lead (Pb), zinc (Zn), and copper (Cu). In this study, the contamination of heavy metals in residential (Domestic) and commercial (Car-wash centre) effluents from urban area of Quetta has been investigated using atomic absorption spectroscopy. The collected liquid effluent was passed through sorbents in vertical flow. The combined batch of Fly ash and Sawdust (adsorbents) showed high sorption capacity 0.0000424 mg·g -1 for lead (residential liquid waste) and 0.0000012 mg·g -1 for Cu (commercial liquid waste). The moderate partition coefficients were 0.001247 (Pb) and 0.000005 (Cu) mol·kg -1 ·Pa -1 for residential and commercial waste respectively. The highest removal efficiency of lead (99.763%) for residential effluent showed the breakthrough at 0.002. Thus, the sorbents used have significantly removal efficiency for Pb, moderate for Zn, and low for Cu. The effluent passed from designed filter media may be greatly effective for washing, cleaning and irrigation purpose.
The location of Pakistan is in a collision zone among the Eurasian and Indian plate boundaries. The geological framework of the Northwest Himalaya makes Northern Pakistan susceptible to frequent moderate to major earthquakes. The devastating earthquake of October 8, 2005 caused 87,000 deaths, 2.8 million displacements and financial loss of 200 Billion USD equivalent to 6% GDP of Pakistan. Islamabad is in seismically active region, the studies conducted for this region addresses the poor soil conditions, non-engineering construction practices and high level of seismic shaking. However, none of these studies provided readily available ground maps (top 30m time average shear wave velocity V s30 , average soil shear wave velocity V sz & depth to bed rock D bed rock ) based on site specific geotechnical database. V s30 , V sz & D bed rock are important parameters for the evaluation of dynamic site characteristics of shallow bed rock sites. In Pakistan, Uniform Building Code (UBC-1997) is currently practiced, and the site classification are defined using site specific V s30 . In this study, geotechnical borehole database of 57 sites of Islamabad was collected to develop GIS based V s30 , V sz & D bed rock maps using Standard Penetration Test value (SPT-N). The borehole database includes, SPT-N, soil description and unit weight of soil for the Islamabad sites. In order to develop shear wave velocity (V s ) profiles, the available V s -SPT empirical correlations were evaluated where both SPT-N & V s measured data is available. The selected available correlations were applied to SPT-N database to develop representative Vs profiles. Using these V s profiles, V s30 , V sz & D bed rock GIS based maps were developed by applying Kriging interpolation in open source QGIS software. The proposed GIS maps can be used in preliminary earthquake design for seismic resilient earthquake design in Islamabad, Pakistan.
One of the important resources required for various Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications like machine translation, information retrieval and text mining, is annotated text corpora. Text corpora annotation process requires parts of speech (POS) tags to mark different parts of text with grammatical annotations in order to identify linguistic properties of a word, sentence or discourse. The process of marking text items is based on two main features 1) grammatical category and 2) context of text (word, sentence or discourse) i.e. relationship with adjacent and related text. Saraiki being one of oldest languages is still resource scarce language in recorded literature as well as in computational context. According to our study, at present, there is no tagset defined for Saraiki language. This work presents first hierarchical POS (MPOST) tag set for the Saraiki language which is designed to be used in morphological, syntactic and lexical annotations of Saraiki language corpora.
The solar irradiation falling on PV-module that converted into heat hence the reducing efficiency. The dust deposition decreases efficiency and resist the amount of solar radiation interacting on surface of PV-panel. The mismatch position placed of PV string can make the mutual shading between the PV-Module, Due to this reason of shading the totally efficiency of PV system falls. To overcome all mentioned problem, in this paper the review of environmental factor and their latest minimizing techniques for optimizing performance of PV-Module is discussed. This paper merely focused on the review of cooling, Cleaning and shading effect techniques.
Biomass based energy conversion systems at different scale produce heat, power, fuels and other by-products which can be used to meet the requirements of domestic and industrial applications. Using different biomass feed stocks; many useful by-products such as bio char can be obtained in addition to energy produced. This study is focused on investigation of effect of activated bio char for wastewater treatment processes. The char residue of coconut shell biomass (CSB) was obtained after gasification; the pyrolysis temperature was maintained between 700- 1250 o C. The particle size of the CSB was kept 1.4-2 mm. After a complete cycle, the CSB bio char (CSBBC) obtained was cleaned, crushed and activated using chemical activation technique. Then activated bio char was used as an adsorbent in jar test conducted with palm oil mill effluent. Fixed volume of wastewater (300 mL) was treated with adsorbent of varying amount i.e., 5, 10, 15, and 20 g. The results indicated the reduction in COD; 79.1%, BOD; 85.62% Color; 94.12%, TDS; 82%, TSS; 78.53% and turbidity; 96%. CSB is readily available, more cost effective and environmental friendly than other commercially available adsorbents.
