Academic submissions (CEDAT)
Permanent URI for this collection
Browse
Recent Submissions
1 - 5 of 519
-
ItemEvaluation of bio-gas potential from water hyacinth(Makerere University, 2018)Lake Victoria is the second largest fresh water lake in the world making it the source of the River Nile which plays host to many dams. Since it has fresh water, it is vested with lots of water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes). Its rapid proliferation on Lake Victoria has been as a result of space, fresh water nutrients, and solar energy. Tons of Water hyacinth are harvested regularly from the Nalubaale dam to prevent it from clogging the water intakes to the turbines. This harvested weed is dumped at a waste site in Buyikwe district. It is costly to transport the harvested waste hyacinth and maintain the waste site where it is dumped. The dumped water hyacinth also pollutes the environment with a foul smell. This project aims at finding an alternative use for the water hyacinth instead of dumping it. This is through using the water hyacinth as biomass for biogas generation and exploring its potential to generate electricity. The research is to be carried out first by studying water hyacinth characteristics as a suitable waste or feedstock for biogas generation. This involves determining the total solids, volatile solids and PH of water hyacinth. There after biogas generation is carried out on a lab scale under different generation conditions in order to ascertain the most suitable digestion conditions which yield the most gas volume and best gas quality. Gas analysis is then carried out to determine the gas quality. This involves finding out the biogas composition. The research also involves calculating the amount of electricity which can be generated from the gas and also selecting the most suitable energy conversion system. Finally, the research involves designing of a large-scale production unit and carrying out a cost benefit analysis to ascertain the economic acceptability of the project. The research carried out highlights the positive results of water hyacinth as a useful weed or waste that can be used for biogas generation to produce electricity of 63.3MWh which can service about 810 households with and average energy consumption of 78.1kWh monthly bringing in a revenue of about Shs40m monthly. This value exceeds the Shs15m cost incurred by ESKOM Uganda Limited on water hyacinth management monthly.
-
ItemMeasuring production rate for the construction of the subgrade layer of a road(Makerere University, 2022-09)The performance of the pavement is highly determined by the subgrade layer of the road due to the fact that it’s the lowest component of a road and it supports the load carried from the upper layers of the road laid on top of it. With the increasing investments by the government of Uganda in the road sector, it is therefore important to determine accurately the production rate of a road subgrade for accurate budgeting and scheduling purposes by the management. This research therefore focused on measuring work undertaken during the construction of the subgrade layer in order to come up with its production rate. A number of five construction sites were visited in Kampala metropolitan to measure the production rate of activities carried out for the construction of aa road sub-grade layer. The most major activities measured on site were excavation of the ground, laying and levelling of the soil and its compaction and their production rates computed for the different horizontal road profiles for a given section of a road. Probability distribution functions for the different activities was obtained using Easyfit and Monte Carlo simulation was then carried out on the probability distribution functions in Mathematica to obtain the total production rate. The study revealed that the total production rate proves the central limit theorem. A relative importance index was then assigned to the different road profiles and probability distributions fit to the RII values and Monte Carlo simulation carried out on the PDF. A linear regression model was then built with the road profile as the independent variable and the total production rate as a variable to predict the production rate for the construction of a road subgrade for the different horizontal road profiles.
-
ItemAssessing the Effect of Interest Rates on the Growth of Commercial Real Estate Markets In Uganda(Makerere University, 2019-09)The purpose of the study was to portray the effect of interest rates on the growth of commercial real estate market in Kampala-Uganda. The real estate sector being one of the major sectors of the economy in Uganda has been largely affected by fluctuating interest rates. The study sort to show case this effect by showing how growth of commercial real estate market is affected by the interest rates. Real estate is a large investment which requires huge capital that most ordinary Ugandans cannot raise, therefore they turn to banks to finance this cost of construction or purchase. The cost of borrowing in all banks is driven by the real interest rate which is fuelled or largely accommodates inflation. Inflation is the key driver of interest rates. The target population of this study was the 10 top mortgage lending banks in Uganda as at March 2019, and 6 real estate developers as all were analyzed to solve the research problem. Data for the purpose of the study was collected using data interview guides in mortgage lending banks that have been running the mortgage product from 2010-2019. In addition, Questionnaires were also used on a sample of 6 property developers where 2 respondents from each company responded. Study findings indicated that when interest rates are lower, people are generally more willing to take out a mortgage for commercial real estate purposes which include among others tenants renting for commercial office and retail space, investors setting up more commercial developments to meet the demand than when rates are higher. Though higher interest rates typically mean a cooling of demand for real estate.
-
ItemAssessing the effectiveness of mediation as a dispute resolution technique in Uganda’s construction industry(Makerere universty, 2019-05)The increased backlog of construction cases due to the increased disputes in the industry in the various legal courts in Uganda has greatly affected the construction industry by increasing the cost of construction and the delay in timely completion of the project hence increasing the overall cost and completion of the project, this creates the need to devise means of resolving such disputes as fast as possible to eliminates such problems in the industry which will hence reduce costs and ensure projects are completed in the stipulated time and the available budget. Among the alternative dispute resolution techniques, mediation being the most commonly used in Uganda’s construction industry, being cheap and a quick process, then there is need to develop the method to help reduce the backlog of cases in the litigation and arbitration courts. However, being commonly used method, doesn’t guarantee that it the most effective method of dispute resolution. Therefore, the study is aimed at assessing the effectiveness of mediation through determining the most causes of disputes and how often these disputes happen, the use of mediation to resolve these dispute and how successful has it been, challenges faced during mediation and to draw strategies to ensure its effectiveness in dispute resolution.
-
ItemDesign and Implementation of a Luganda Text Normalization Module for a Speech Synthesis Software Program(Makerere University, 2019-06)This report investigates the problem of text normalization; specifically, the normalization of nonstandard words (NSWs) in Luganda. Non-standard words can be defined as those word tokens which do not have a dictionary entry, and cannot be pronounced using the usual letter tophoneme conversion rules. NSWs pose a challenge to the proper functioning of text to speech technology, and the solution is to spell them out in such a way that they can be pronounced appropriately. In addition to ordinary words and names, real text contains non-standard “words” (NSW), including numbers, abbreviations, dates, currency amounts and acronyms. Typically, one cannot find NSW in a dictionary, nor can one find their pronunciation by an application of ordinary “letter-to-sound” rules. Non-standard words also have a greater propensity than ordinary words to be ambiguous with respect to their interpretation or pronunciation. In many applications, it is desirable to “normalize” text by replacing the NSWs with the contextually appropriate ordinary word or sequence of words. Typical technology for text normalization involves sets of ad hoc rules tuned to handle one or two genres of text (often newspaper-style text) with the expected result that the techniques do not usually generalize well to new domains. Text normalization means converting non-standard words into standard words. Such words can be in the format of numbers, dates, time, measurements, currencies and abbreviations. Text Normalization ensures that these non-standard words are pronounced easily by a TTS system. Itis therefore an important part of any text-to-speech system because unintelligible speech is produced, especially for languages like Luganda, if text normalization is not implemented. In this report, a rule-based Luganda text normalization module that detects, classifies and verbalizes numbers, dates, time, measurements, currencies and abbreviations into Luganda words was designed and implemented using python programming language. Its implementation will enable production of intelligible speech by Luganda text-to-speech systems.