A tidal current turbine is a device functioning in a manner similar to wind turbine for harnessing energy from tidal currents, a group of which is called a farm. The existing approaches used to predict power from tidal current turbine farms oversimplify the hydrodynamic interactions between turbines, which significantly affects the results. The major focus of this dissertation is to study the relationship between turbine distribution (the relative position of the turbines) and the hydrodynamic interactions between turbines, and its impact on the power from a farm. A new formulation of the discrete vortex method (DVM-UBC) is proposed to describe the behavior of turbines and unsteady flow mathematically, and a numerical model is developed to predict the performance, the unsteady wake and acoustic emission of a stand-alone turbine using DVM-UBC. Good agreement is obtained between the results obtained with DVM-UBC and published numerical and experimental results. Then, another numerical model is developed to predict the performance, wake and acoustic emission of a two-turbine system using DVM-UBC. The results show that the power of a two-turbine system with optimal relative position is about 25% more than two times that of a stand-alone turbine under the same conditions. The torque such a system may fluctuate 50% less than that of a stand-alone turbine. The acoustic emission of such a system may be 35% less than that of a stand-alone turbine. As an extension, a numerical procedure is developed to estimate the efficiency of an N-turbine system by using a linear theory together with the two-turbine system model. By integrating above hydrodynamic models for predicting power and a newly-developed Operation and Maintenance (O&M) model for predicting the cost, a system model is framed to estimate the energy cost using a scenario-based cost-effectiveness analysis. This model can estimate the energy cost more accurately than the previous models because it breaks down turbine’s components and O&M strategies in much greater detail when studying the hydrodynamics and reliability of the turbine. This dissertation provides a design tool for farm planners, and shed light on other disciplines such as environmental sciences and oceanography.

<p>The study seeks to establish the state of infrastructure management system, pertaining to electricity distribution, as an example of policy implementation.</p>

In order to successfully compete against the use of fossil fuels to generate electricity, one of the challenges in the photovoltaic (PV) business currently in focus is on the asset management of large PV plants, in which developing control techniques to prognosticate and evaluate the future energy performance will be essential. Infrared thermography inspections can give meaningful support to assess the quality and performance of PV modules. However, the implementation of a cost-effective method to scan and check huge PV plants represents different challenges, such as the cost and time of detecting PV module defects with their classification and exact localization within the solar plant. In this context, it has recently been investigated the potential of a new innovative technology in the PV plants monitoring operations by using drones. The main purpose of this work is to establish a scientific basis for the interpretation of thermographic images taken by drones, in particular, regarding the influence of thermographic irregularities which will negatively influence the performance of PV plants. The drone is employed to monitor PV modules conditions by using special thermography sensors mounted on it in order to scan images. The captured images are then automatically sent to a technical office database for the image processing software. This special software receives, stores and analyses the captured images to detect the specific defect on the PV modules. Then, all information is processed and reported to the final decision-making team to decide about the best solution for the particular degraded PV module, in relation with the requirements from the operation and maintenance (O&amp;M) services. In this particularly study project of the inspected PV plant situated in the UK, which has been carried out by trained personnel at Quintas Energy (QE), the majority of identified faults, which influence the PV module performance (especially the power output significantly), are on a sub-panel level, either individual cells or uneven hot spots. There are also some modules with bypass diode faults as well as a string fault was detected. Such faults must be repaired by the PV module manufacturer, in relation to the manufacturer’s warranties, without any cost at all since the PV modules are indeed still in warranty. It has been concluded that, in comparison with traditional manned systems by using hand-held cameras, the main functionality of using drones is the early fault diagnosis which could reduce corrective maintenance activities, since defects are easily and quickly identified and, then, repaired. This fact could reduce defects to become more serious and, thus, more difficult to be repaired, along with their correspondent production losses and costs. QE has learned by making mistakes during this project study and gained experience of this unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) technology. Currently, they are in the process of improving this technique and will continue to implement it to all their PV plants since the efficiency of PV systems can be significantly improved by appropriate use of O&amp;M instruments and benefit from innovative monitoring tools, such as the unmanned aerial technology.

Although the access to adequate safe drinking water is taken for granted in developed countries and urban settlements in some developing countries at the end of 2002 it was estimated that globally, some 1.1 billion people still rely on unsafe drinking water sources particularly in the developing regions of India and Africa. Malawi is one of the developing countries located in the arid-semiarid Sub-Saharan African region with only 62% of its people having access to safe drinking water. Boreholes and dug wells equipped with hand pumps is the technology that has assisted the country to increase the proportion of people having access to safe drinking water. The underlying objectives of the study were to critically characterise the existing rural water facilities management systems, and to assess the status of the water facilities that were provided to rural communities by different organisations and individuals. The aim is to form an information base upon which rural water development efforts will be advanced and to expose points of intervention for sustainable rural water supply. A survey was conducted in two traditional authorities of Kapeni and Lundu in Blantyre rural district where 94 water users were interviewed in their households. Physical inspection survey of the water facilities in the area under study was done. Focus group discussions and informal key informants’ interviews were also done. A majority (54%) of the respondents indicated that they participated in various stages of their water supply project. The actual responsibility for the management of all water points which were visited lies with a representative group of local community known as water points committee (WPC). 97% of the water facilities that were surveyed had WPCs of which 67% received training in management, operation and maintenance (O&amp;M) of the water facilities. There are two types of hand pumps that were found in the area, Malda and Afridev. 83% of the water facilities were still in order. The downtimes of the water facilities ranged from 1 to 360 days depending on the kind of fault. The traditional leaders, Health Surveillance Assistants (HSAs) from government and mission clinics, water facility providers and the local communities themselves are the key players at community level. The trust that the communities have in their local leadership, the approach used in provision of the water facilities, the benefits that accrued to the local communities, and the length of time the WPCs serve the communities are the major factors that influence the communities’ participation in O&amp;M activities. Inadequate number of qualified area technicians, theft of hand pump parts and high prices of some spare parts are some of the problems that impede effective O&amp;M of the water facilities. To improve management, O&amp;M of the water supply systems in the area communities have additional number of the water points, and training and refresher courses for WPCs and caretakers as some of their immediate needs. The common technical problems are hand pump related in water facilities equipped with Afridev hand pump and well drying for Malda hand pump equipped water facilities. The WPCs that are not active are those whose water facilities have been out of order for a long time. Recommendations are made regarding; planning phase, construction and operation phase, and government regulation.

Masters in Public Administration - MPA / The study seeks to establish the state of infrastructure management system, pertaining to electricity distribution, as an example of policy implementation.

A tidal current turbine is a device functioning in a manner similar to wind turbine for harnessing energy from tidal currents, a group of which is called a farm. The existing approaches used to predict power from tidal current turbine farms oversimplify the hydrodynamic interactions between turbines, which significantly affects the results. The major focus of this dissertation is to study the relationship between turbine distribution (the relative position of the turbines) and the hydrodynamic interactions between turbines, and its impact on the power from a farm. A new formulation of the discrete vortex method (DVM-UBC) is proposed to describe the behavior of turbines and unsteady flow mathematically, and a numerical model is developed to predict the performance, the unsteady wake and acoustic emission of a stand-alone turbine using DVM-UBC. Good agreement is obtained between the results obtained with DVM-UBC and published numerical and experimental results. Then, another numerical model is developed to predict the performance, wake and acoustic emission of a two-turbine system using DVM-UBC. The results show that the power of a two-turbine system with optimal relative position is about 25% more than two times that of a stand-alone turbine under the same conditions. The torque such a system may fluctuate 50% less than that of a stand-alone turbine. The acoustic emission of such a system may be 35% less than that of a stand-alone turbine. As an extension, a numerical procedure is developed to estimate the efficiency of an N-turbine system by using a linear theory together with the two-turbine system model. By integrating above hydrodynamic models for predicting power and a newly-developed Operation and Maintenance (O&M) model for predicting the cost, a system model is framed to estimate the energy cost using a scenario-based cost-effectiveness analysis. This model can estimate the energy cost more accurately than the previous models because it breaks down turbine’s components and O&M strategies in much greater detail when studying the hydrodynamics and reliability of the turbine. This dissertation provides a design tool for farm planners, and shed light on other disciplines such as environmental sciences and oceanography. / Applied Science, Faculty of / Mechanical Engineering, Department of / Graduate

Le contexte hospitalier actuel exhorte les établissements de santé à une gestion plus rigoureuse et objective des ressources dans le but de maitriser leur performance. Le patrimoine immobilier des établissements publics de santé contribue à la qualité des soins demandée, à la qualité d'accueil des patients et des conditions de travail du personnel. Aujourd'hui, les hôpitaux demeurent conçus et réalisés sans aucune anticipation des coûts futurs d'exploitation-maintenance. Ces coûts qui représentent indéniablement une valeur importante du budget global de fonctionnement, sont pourtant méconnus. Afin de palier à la faiblesse des moyens de financement public, l'administration a comme recours la mise en place d'une nouvelle procédure de contrats de Partenariat Public Privé. Or celle-ci ne dispose pas d'un minimum d'informations en terme de connaissances sur les dépenses d'exploitation-maintenance actuelles de son patrimoine. Dans ce contexte, le coût global constitue une approche innovante dans la gestion des projets immobiliers.La problématique développée dans ce travail de thèse est donc d'approfondir les connaissances en amont des coûts d'exploitation-maintenance des bâtiments hospitaliers. Elle apporte un éclairage sur la relation entre les coûts d'exploitation-maintenance et l'activité hospitalière. Elle propose ainsi une réponse plus adaptée et plus opérationnelle à la question de l'estimation de ces coûts d'exploitation-maintenance en aidant le maître d'ouvrage à prendre en compte l'activité de soin et les choix architecturaux dans son projet. Cela revient à proposer une méthode d'aide à la décision pour construire un bâtiment hospitalier qui minimise les dépenses futures de fonctionnement. Cette méthode s'appuie sur un modèle d'estimation et sur un observatoire des coûts d'exploitation-maintenance réel de 37 établissements publics de santé. / The current situations of hospitals require more efficient management in order to control their performance. The real estates of public hospitals contribute to the quality of required healthcare, the quality of patient care and working conditions of healthcare staff.Today, hospitals are designed and built without anticipating of future evolution of operation and maintenance costs. These costs that are an important contribution to the value of the overall operating budget are underestimated and far unknown.To overcome the lack of public finance, the government has so used the Public Private Partnership Contracts as a new procedure. Yet the government does not have a minimum of information about operating and maintenance expenses of its real estates. In this context, the Whole Life Cycle Costing is an innovative approach in managing public healthcare real estate projects.The problem developed in this thesis is to expend is to expend the knowledge of operation and maintenance costs of healthcare real estates. This thesis highlights the relationship between operating and maintenance costs and hospital activity. It proposes a more efficient response in the issue of estimating these costs by helping the director to take into account the healthcare activity and the architectural choices. It provides a decision making tool for designing and building a new hospitals for minimizing future costs of operation.This method is based on a model for estimating costs and on an observatory of real operation and maintenance costs of 37 public hospitals.

Magister Philosophiae - MPhil (LAS) (Land and Agrarian Studies) / Government's decision to devolve irrigation management to farmers was partly influenced by international policy imperatives, which were propounded mainly by institutions associated with the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and the inability by the government to continue funding operation and maintenance costs. The central question of the study is to understand the effects of Irrigation Management Transfer (IMT) on productivity, operation and maintenance in the Mamina Irrigation Scheme. Interviews with various primary and secondary stakeholders that included the irrigators, local political leadership and locally-based agriculture extension officers were carried out. The interviews were aimed at getting an insight on land tenure, participation and representation of women, water and electricity supply system and pricing, effects of irrigation management arrangements on equity and productivity, understanding the irrigators' food security status, operation and maintenance arrangement after Irrigation Management Transfer (IMT). Findings of this study suggest that the existing governance arrangements have partly led to low crop productivity, increased water and electricity bill arrears, poor water distribution, change to uneconomic plot sizes, unsustainable increase in the number of irrigators, failure to organise for operation and maintenance. The key factors influencing the poor performance include poor collaboration, pumping system that utilised more electricity, inability of the irrigators to replace leaky pipes, failure of the irrigators to contribute towards electricity and water bills, failure of the irrigators to contribute towards operation and maintenance. The study identified nine challenges that affected the success of IMT. The challenges that lay at the heart of Mamina irrigation scheme were mainly caused by the poor irrigation technology design, pricing structure of electricity, water permit system, inequalities in water distribution, low gender participation and representation, non-availability of formal markets for certain crops, food insecurity, plot alloction and land disputes. Poverty analysis has shown that the irrigators' ability to escape from poverty or food insecurity is critically dependent upon their access to assets. Different assets are required to achieve different livelihood outcomes. The cycle of accumulation of utility bill arrears continued even after devolution because the same defective irrigation infrastructure was transferred to the irrigators. In the case of Mamina irrigation scheme, modernisation of the scheme was required to achieve different livelihood outcomes, but because this did not happen the recurrent utility bill arrears, low productivity and food insecurity continued to be a very serious challenge even after IMT.

I denna rapport har det utförts två fallstudier från två olika vindkraftsanläggningar och med hjälp av en utarbetad modell har livscykelkostnaderna jämförts för de två fallstudierna.Resultatet visade att livscykelkostnaden per producerad kWh sjunker allteftersom den installerade effekten blir högre.Kostnadsmodellen som utarbetats och tillämpats för resultaten har visat sig ha hög verifierbarhet då resultaten har varit jämförbara med litterära studier. / In this report, conducted two case studies from two wind farms and using an elaborate model, life cycle costs compared to the two case studies.The results showed that the lifecycle cost per kWh decreases as the installed power increases.Cost model as developed and applied to generate the reported results have been generated in the results that are comparable to literary studies.

Syfte: Bristerna på informationsöverföringen mellan de olika faserna i en byggnads livscykel har en negativ inverkan på förvaltningen. På grund av de komplexa informationsmängderna bör förvaltningen specificera vilken information de vill få levererad från projekteringen. Den negativa inverkan kan minskas med hjälp av BIM, då BIM underlättar samverkan mellan olika discipliner. Därför är målet med denna undersökning att underlätta implementeringen av BIM inom den offentliga tekniska fastighetsförvaltningen på landstingsnivå, och följande frågeställningar ställs: (1) Hur ser processen kring tillsyn och skötsel ut inom teknisk fastighetsförvaltning på landstingsnivå? (2) Vilken information behövs i anknytning till denna process, för att en teknisk fastighetsförvaltning skall kunna genomföras effektivt? (3) Hur kan man med BIM tillhandahålla denna information? (4) Hur bör man gå tillväga för att lyckas med implementeringen av BIM inom fastighetsförvaltning?  Metod: Angreppssättet för undersökningen är en fallstudie, med en teknikavdelning inom en offentlig fastighetsförvaltning i ett landsting, som studerat fall. Samtliga frågeställningar bygger på varandra: datainsamling och analys har skett i växelverkan. Frågeställningarna besvaras till största del av litteraturstudier och semistrukturerade intervjuer, men även observationer och dokumentanalyser har genomförts.  Resultat: Den första frågeställningens resultat visar på att processen tillsyn och skötsel är komplex och innefattar många olika discipliner. Processen innehåller en administrativ del där åtgärder och intervall kopplas till installationer i fastighetsförvaltningssystemet. Vidare innefattar processen att åtgärderna utförs av driftpersonalen, och om problem uppstår skapas beslutspunkter där teknikförvaltare och driftingenjörer konsulteras för att lösa problemet.  Resultatet på frågeställning 2 visar på ett stort behov av informationsmängder. Den information som behövs av flest personer är; placering, installationens komponenter och fabrikat/leverantör. Det är viktigt att poängtera att även om viss information inte behövs av lika många personer, innebär det inte att informationen är av mindre värde.  Vidare visar resultatet på frågeställning 3 att informationsmängderna som framkommit i frågeställning 2 kan tillhandahållas med BIM genom att koppla informationen till objekt via property sets, databaser eller portaler.  Resultatet på frågeställning 4 visar tillvägagångssättet vid implementering av BIM i förvaltning; processkartläggning, informationsanalys och koppling av informationen.  Konsekvenser: Studien visar att det finns goda möjligheter att använda BIM för att tillhandahålla den information som behövs inom en offentlig fastighetsförvaltning. Vid implementering är det viktigt att kartlägga processer och informationsbehov som finns i organisationen. Implementeringen bör ske i anknytning till ny- eller ombyggnation.  Begränsningar: Studien beaktar endast tillsyn och skötsel inom teknisk fastighetsförvaltning och undersöker varken ekonomiska eller tekniska aspekter. Resultatet anses generellt giltigt, men ett än mer komplett resultat kan erhållas vid en större undersökning av förvaltningsorganisationen samt med fler intervjurespondenter. / Purpose: The shortcomings of information transfer between the different building phases has a negative impact on facility management (FM). Because of the complex information needs it is important that the FM specifies which information they want delivered from the design and construction phases. The negative impact can be reduced with BIM because of its ability to ease communication between the disciplines. Therefore, the aim of the thesis is to ease the implementation of BIM within the technical FM of the public sector, and following questions are asked: (1) What does the process of operation and maintenance in a technical department of FM in a public sector look like? (2) Which information is needed in this process, to effectively accomplish the FM activities? (3) How can you, with BIM, provide this information? (4) How should you do to succeed with the implementation of BIM in FM?  Method: The approach of the thesis is a case study, studying the technical department of a public FM. All questions are based on each other, which means that the data collection and the analysis have been done in interaction. Mostly, the questions have been answered by literature studies and interviews, but observations and document analysis has also been done.  Findings: The result of the first question shows that the process of operation and maintenance is complex and includes many different disciplines. The process includes an administrative part where actions and intervals are connected to the installations in the FM system. The process also includes that the maintenance personnel performs the actions, and if problems occur, the technical manager and the operating engineer are being consulted for a solution.  The result of question 2 shows a big need of different information. The information needed by the most people are; placement, the installation’s component and manufacturer/supplier. Although some information might not be needed by a lot of people, it is important to point out that the information does not have lower value.  The result of the third question shows that the information that emerged from question 2 could be provided with BIM by connecting the information to an object through property sets, databases or portals.  The result of the fourth question shows the way to implement BIM in FM; process mapping, information analysis and connect the information.  Implications: The study shows that there are good opportunities to use BIM to provide relevant information needed by the FM. It is important to analyse the processes and information needs within the organisation. The implementation should be done in connection to a new construction or a reconstruction.  Limitations: The study only observes operation and maintenance within the technical department of FM and does not investigate either economical nor technical aspects. The result is considered to be generally valid, however, a more complete result can be achieved with a bigger research of the FM organisation and several interview respondents.