Journal of the Institute of Engineering

Burgers' Equation and Traffic Flow

Amrit Sharma — 2023-04-12

Burgers' equation is a well-known partial differential equation that arises in many areas such as fluid mechanics, non linear acoustics, gas dynamics, and traffic flow. This paper aims to discuss Burgers’ equation and its applications. We begin with the historical development of Burgers’ equation. We mainly focus on the study of traffic flow models where we use the inviscid version of Burger’ equation to model the flow. To this end, we discuss the classification of traffic flow models and some recent development of traffic flow models.

Equivalence among the Banach-Alaoglu theorem, Ascoli- Arzela theorem and Tychonoff's theorem

Nand Kishor Kumar — 2023-04-12

This article is meant to serve as a bridge among these three theorems. The similarity among Banach-Alaoglu theorem, Ascoli-Arzela theorem, and the Tychonoff's theorem are proved. Banach- Alaoglu theorem, Ascoli-Arzela theorem are derived as an immediate consequence of the Tychonoff theorem. These all theorems are compact and equicontinuous and compact Hausdorff spaces are equivalent.

Development of Composite Floor Tiles of Sand and Recycled Thermoplastics Mixture: A Sustainable Approach for Building Material Production

Dak Bahadur Khadka — 2023-04-12

Environmental degradation, depletion of natural resources and increase in demand of construction material for the settlement of rapid growth in population has driven the scientific study to find the best alternatives for construction materials. This study aims to provide the idea of sustainability and economy via utilization of non-degradable plastic waste product. The research explores the potential of plastic waste and sand to produce floor tiles as composite construction material. The fabricated floor tiles were tested for water absorption, compression strength, load bearing and drop test to characterize its durability and suitability for paving on non-traffic pavement of public places. The maximum load bearing capacity was found 660KN and compressive strength of 25.4MPA with minimum water absorption of 0.04 and hence found very suitable as paving material in public places for all weather condition. The study recommends the recycledplastic waste as green building material for sustainable development.

Effect of Change in Geometry on Time Period of Lattice Parabolic Shells Using SAP2000 OAPI

Rajan Suwal — 2023-04-12

Nowadays, shell structures are frequently used in various areas and are preferred by architects and structural engineers due to its aesthetics and efficient load carrying capacities. Shell structures, especially lattice shell structures, are commonly used in airports, malls, train station and stadium where aesthetics and larger span are of prime importance. Theses lattice shell structures are formed by arranging the structural element in a triangulated form and held together by fixed nodes which prevent it from local buckling. Lattice Shells provide the benefit of thin shell structures, yet overcomes the difficulties of casting, i.e., they do not need complicated formworks.

Design Thinking: A New Model for Future University Education

Bharat Raj Pahari — 2023-04-12

Human civilization always opted for the comfort and happiness. There are many literatures supporting this perception. There are the evidences that the learning process started from the time of cognitive revolution, the time mankind started communicating each-other. In the course of time, many inventions happened, and technology emerged as strong tools for the maneuvering of human activities. The ideas and thoughts are evolving in different time interval in the quest of better life. However, dissatisfactions are emerging and education, as initiator and being the instrument of change, has not been able to control over these dissatisfactions. There are much evidences of antagonistic events. conflicts are emerging in diverse forms and shapes in different parts of the world. Current social practices have created power centers in every societies. The foremost trend appearing right now is the race for controlling the resources and creation of wealth. This kind of trend prevailing in the society is detrimental in attaining satisfaction and happiness. Apart from this, rapid advancement of technology has caused dynamic changes in the culture and social behaviors. The cultural dimensions are taking new shapes owing to technology. In this adverse condition, education is under tremendous criticism. This is true that education creates knowledge & skill to the individuals, but it also sensitizes the societal issues. In this context, education is at the center of politics and many scholars consider education and politics complementary to each other. This signifies that education is an integral part of society and it has connection with the government or public affairs of a country. Visualizing the global and local conflicts, present system of education has not proved capable in generating type of knowledge that is relevant to today's changing society. The direction of education is especially important to establish peace and harmony in the society. Therefore, there is a need of rethinking rational model of education. The methodology adopted in the paper is the extensive review of the literature and The comprehensive study of societal issues appearing in the society. Besides, the experience of the author in the academia is also contributing to the preparation of the paper.

Qualitative Evaluation of Reconstructed Masonry Residential Building after the Gorkha Earthquake 2015 in Rural Areas of Nepal: A Case Study at Bhalche, Nuwakot

Thakur Tamang — 2023-04-12

Unreinforced Masonry buildings (URMs) were the most prevalent construction practice in the rural areas of Nepal. During the 2015 Gorkha earthquake, most of these buildings suffered critical damage. Consequently, after the disaster, National Reconstruction Authority (NRA) was established to provide technical and financial assistance in the reconstruction process. This paper provides a qualitative framework for the assessment of masonry residential buildings in rural areas, considering the NRA minimum requirement, with Bhalche, Nuwakot as the study area. Rapid Visual Screening (RVS) and Key Informant Survey (KIS) were used to study, inspect and collect data and obtained results are compared with NRA minimum guidelines and Codal provisions. The study focuses only on a small but representative sample of reconstructed buildings rather than every building, with how and why of a particular issue rather than how many. The examination found that the reconstructed buildings in Bhalche have minor noncompliance issues, while significant noncompliance issues are found in all the houses constructed before the Government of Nepal’s (GON) initiatives for reconstruction by the local people themselves using available local resources and existing knowledge. The KIS and RVS results are supported by case study examples and photos, respectively. The study also reviews the current building typology in Bhalche and attempts to delineate the rationale contributing to the undesired discrepancy in reconstructed buildings.

Ecofeminist Reading of Grapes of Wrath: Women as Life Giving Force

Rena Thapa — 2023-04-12

This paper makes study of John Steinbeck’s portrayal of two female characters as life giving force in his novel The Grapes of Wrath by adopting the ecofeminist theory and perspective as its modality. The main objective of this article is to explore the two female characters, Ma Jode and Rose of Sharon who endure the adverse external forces as the nature herself- reviving, renewing and resuscitating - to live and save life. The two strong female members of Joad family, Ma Joad and Rose of Sharon maintain their spirit of bounty and compassion high throughout the time of crisis. Ma joad’s role expands with the shift in stereotypical gender role at the household of Joads when Pa Joad who is tied to land loses his ego and spirit, and gradually becomes nostalgic. Ma’s holding the powerful stature in the family in turn exhibits the vital power of hope for survival. She is a symbolic matriarchal power to reinforce human connection who sustains heroic will to survive and to humanize natural instinct during the massive economic threat on the family. Ma and Pa both are trapped on the inflow of change of time and space; however Ma’s philosophy of flow underlies her movement to change. Though Ma Joad and Rose of Sharon are stripped off of their domesticity and maternity respectively they preserve the spirit of compassion to save humanity.

Life Cycle Energy Analysis of the Academic Building: A Case Study of Shree Balpremi School in Kathmandu Valley, Nepal

Roshani Subedi — 2023-04-12

A comprehensive life cycle energy analysis of a 648.12 m², three-story building with a projected 60-year life span was conducted. An inventory of all installed materials, material replacements for building structure, envelope, interior structure, and finishes is prepared. The embodied energy calculated for construction phase showed that the foundation, structural frames, masonry work and finishing work represent 22%, 32%, 14% and 13% of the total embodied energy, respectively. The concreting work represents 59% of the total embodied energy. The masonry work represents 16% of the total embodied energy. The material footprint during construction is 1448.77 kg/m². Computer modeling is used to determine primary energy consumption for cooling and lighting of the building. The primary energy intensity over the building’s life cycle was 2.9 x 10⁴ GJ. The production of building materials, their transportation to the site, and the construction of the building accounts for 12.11% of life cycle primary energy consumption. The remaining 87.89% was the operational energy of the building. It clearly showed that lifecycle distribution of energy consumption was concentrated in the operation of the building. This study shows that the life cycle energy analysis of a building can successfully lead to sustainable and energy-efficient building construction. In a broader sense, building life cycle energy analysis will assist in understanding the energy consumption pattern of a building, which can be used to maintain energy efficiency in the design and construction of the building.

Political Profiling of Nepali Twitter Users using Vector Model

Arun K. Timalsina — 2023-04-12

Everyday people in social networks create a huge amount of data as posts, blogs, tweets, articles, comments, etc. in the form of text, images, audios and videos. The number of social media users and the data they are adding up in cloud is increasing drastically day by day. People from all over the globe with different region, culture, language, education, public figures posts or blogs reflecting their vision and opinion. These micro-blogs are now being used by researchers and business houses for assessing customer opinion to their implicit intension and behavior. Using the tweet contents, this research is to classify a Nepali twitter user to one of the pre-defined class of political parties in Nepal using vector space model. In this approach a set of words is defined as document class that represents to a political party. A number of steps for text-preprocessing is to be done based on morphological structure of Nepali language for the better result. TF-IDF and Doc2Vec methods are used to extract the feature of the terms being used in tweets. Similarity measure is used to match the tweeter's profile with political party's class through similarity matching score. Vector model-based TF-IDF and Doc2Vec methods are compared for their effectiveness in the domain of tweets in Nepali language.

Triphala Seed Stones-Derived Nanoporous Activated Carbon Materials with Excellent Adsorption Applications

Chhabi Lal Gnawali — 2023-04-12

Biomass-derived activated carbon materials with nanoporous structure exhibit high surface area due to well-defined pore structure as a result of which the activated carbon from biomass could be suitable materials for high performance separation, purification technologies and energy storage application as efficient adsorbent. Here, the novel nano-porous activated carbon from Triphala (Harro, Barro and Amala) seed stones by chemical activation using Zinc Chloride as an activating agent is presented. The prepared activated carbon is characterized by iodine and methylene blue adsorption properties and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). Keeping other parameter constant, the effect of carbonization temperature of the activated carbon was studied. The experimental result indicates that Triphala seed stones and Zinc Chloride at mixing ratio1:1 by weight, carbonized for 4 hours at 500 0C shows high value of iodine number and methylene blue number as 856.8 mgg-1 and 373.5 mgg-1 respectively. The surface area, micropore volume and the total pore volume of the sample using quadratic model was found to be 908.9 m2g-1, 0.827 cm3g- and 0.932 cm3g-1 respectively. The prepared activated carbon possesses well-defined pore-size distribution with nanoporous structure These results show that Triphala seed stones derived nanoporous activated carbon will be a suitable material for water purification as well as energy applications.

Application of Activated Carbon Prepared from Peach (Prunus persica) Seed Stone for the Adsorption of Acid Yellow 17 Dye

Vasanta Gurung — 2023-04-12

The present study investigates the removal of Acid Yellow 17 Dye from aqueous solution by adsorption on the activated carbon prepared from Peach (Prunus persica) Seed Stone by chemical activation with zinc chloride. The activated carbon was prepared at carbonization temperature 400°C. The activated carbon prepared was analyzed by chemical methods such as Iodine number and Methylene blue number to identify micropore and mesopore content. The activated carbon was also analyzed by instrumental techniques like XRD and SEM. The SEM of the activated carbon exhibited the pores of different diameters while XRD showed two broad diffraction peaks indicating the amorphous nature of the activated carbon. The batch adsorption studies have been carried out to investigate the adsorption of the dye from aqueous solution. The optimum pH, contact time and adsorbent dose for the adsorption process have been found to be 2, 90 minutes and 1g/L respectively. The results showed that the activated carbon prepared from Peach Seed Stone can be utilized as an effective adsorption media for removal of Acid Yellow 17 dye from aqueous solutions.

Response Spectra for Nepal through Probabilistic Approach

Sunita Ghimire — 2023-04-12

In this study, a rectangular area surrounding Nepal, bounded by the coordinates (N 25° 30' 00", E 78° 30' 00"), (N 31° 30' 00", E 89° 30' 00") has been considered. Study area has been divided into five hundred areas by defining the grids at the interval of 0.5 degree along longitude and 0.25 degree along latitude. By preparing detailed earthquake catalogue and defining areal seismic sources, probabilistic seismic hazard analysis has been done in terms of peak ground acceleration. The completeness of the data has been done by using Stepp's procedure. Seismicity in four regions of study area has been evaluated by defining 'a' and 'b' parameters of Gutenberg Richter recurrence relationship. Average hazard spectrum for 10% probability of exceedence in fifty years in five percent damped condition is obtained and then normalized to obtain design spectra and seismic zoning factor ‘Z’ is obtained in terms of contour for all areas of Nepal.

End to End based Nepali Speech Recognition System

Basanta Joshi — 2023-04-12

Today, technology is an indispensable part of life. To make familiar with the technology, Automatics Speech Recognition (ASR) system plays an important role. For the Nepali language due to inadequate spoken corpus, there has not been much research work, and there is not such a good model that can perform ASR. This paper presents an idea for constructing the end-to-end based Nepali ASR system and the necessary data (spoken corpus) for the Nepali language. The Nepali ASR system is able to translate spoken Nepali language to its correct textual representation. The system is built using the MFCC feature extraction, CNN for spatial feature extraction, GRU to construct the acoustic model, and CTC for decoding. The best model is built by using tuning the batch size and varying the number of the GRU units and GRU layers. This model (without using language model) provides the WER of 49.85%, 46.39%, and 52.89% on the train, validation, and test data respectively. And by using the uni-gram language model, the final model provides the WER of 35.40%, 37.50%, and 39.72% on train, validation, and test data respectively.

Multimodal Approach to Analyze Disaster Related Information by using Image & Text Classifications Model on Twitter Data

Bansaj Pradhan — 2023-04-12

When a natural disaster occurs, we all are eager to know about it, someone willing to help and donate, and someone maybe just curious about it. Multimedia content on social media platforms provides essential information during disasters. Information transmitted includes reports of missing or found people, infrastructure damage, and injured or dead people. Despite the fact that numerous studies have shown how important text and image contents are for disaster response, past research has mostly focused on the text modality with little success with multimodality. The most recent study on the multimodal classification of tweets about disasters makes use of fairly simple models like CNN and VGG16. In order to improve the multimodal categorization of disaster-related tweets, we have gone further in this study work and used cutting-edge text and image classification models. The study focused on two distinct classification tasks: determining if a tweet is informative or not. The various feature extraction techniques from the textual data corpus and the pre processing of the corresponding image corpus are incorporated into the multimodal analysis process. We then use various classification models to train and predict the output and compare their performances while adjusting the parameters to enhance the outcomes. Models like ResNet and Bi-LSTM for text classification and image classification, respectively, were trained and examined. The Bi-LSTM and ResNet multimodal architecture performs better than models developed utilizing a single modality (ResNet for image or Bi-LSTM for text alone), according to the results. Additionally, it demonstrates that for both classification tasks, our Bi-LSTM and ResNet model outperforms the FastText and VGG-16 baseline model by a respectable margin.