ORCs are being used in low grade heat recovery applications. The Model prepared is a 1 kW ORC comprising of four main parts: evaporator, Scroll expander, condenser and feed pump. Main restriction, while designing ORC model, was to choose working fluid. Working fluid will be a refrigerant whose properties will be modified to the working conditions in which the heat recovery is carried out. A refrigerant R134a (a gas used for Household refrigeration system) has been selected as working media due to its required performance, high safety and frequent availability in Pakistan. An investigational study has been carried out on an ORC, recovering heat from hot water at a temperature ranging from 130-140°C. The scroll compressor will be used in reverse as a volumetric scroll expander to extract work from the system. Physical Model of every equipment of the test bench has been validated. The ORC test bench has been commissioned and testing has been performed under different working conditions to understand its behavior broadly. In the last section of this thesis work, future work has been proposed for better optimization of the ORC test bench.

The handwritten character recognition is considered an active recognition problem under the field of image processing and pattern recognition. Both area of research has gained so much popularity in few last years due to technology advancements and necessity of time. The handwritten character recognition also becomes popular due to globalization and technology improvements. In previous time, the information was stored in written form only. To utilize that information, one needs such an advanced method which can do this task efficiently and without reliance on human. This work provides such a simplified and accurate method for the recognition of handwritten characters. A system is proposed to recognize characters using convolutional neural network and is evaluated on a benchmark dataset named as EMNIST to show the performance of the proposed technique. The proposed system gained the accuracy of 97.62% which is better than various existing methods.

In this paper, we are going to suggest a prominent feature of smart Grid i.e. Demand side management. Smart grid is up to date facility used for bi-communication system of Generation, transmission and consumption. The fundamental principle of smart grid is demand response analysis. For supposition, we focus on three type of frequently used load which are base, continuous and discrete load. A sufficient volume of load in the form of diversified appliance of different power rating would be considered. Our main objective is the reduction of peak to average ratio enhances the efficiency of smart grid. For this, a revived scheme of electricity consumption pattern is required keeping in consideration reliability, feasibility and user preference. Subsequently, it will decrease the electricity production and consumption cost. Increasing the number of appliances would complicate the problem to some extent so making it more challenging. In theoretical work small numbers of appliances are taken. Genetic algorithm would be used to solve this specific problem. Simulation results would show the prove that there is an ultimate reduction in the cost by using the algorithm.

Energy sector plays a key role and a dominant factor for the economic growth of country. This research article compares the relationship between energy consumption and economic growth. In Pakistan, main sources of energy generation are primarily contingent on traditional fuels and its large percentage is imported and also linked strongly with Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In fact most countries, especially underdeveloped, relies more on oil to meet energy demands but if affects the economy unfavorably. Its import in a great way also affects the nation indirectly by causing unexpected inflation. On oil, Local traditional alternative fuels must be preferred to maintain the economic growth. In this research article, energy model Long-Range Energy Alternatives Planning System (LEAP) has been used in various scenarios to find out energy demand for 2013 and has predicted the demand till year 2040. This analysis uncovers and postulates the new postulates for the think tanks to find out best alternatives headway of energy sector of Pakistan to overcome on energy deficiency in coming years.

Carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) strips are widely used all over the globe as a repair and strengthening material for concrete elements. This paper looks at comparison of numerous methods to rehabilitate concrete beams with the use of CFRP sheet strips. This research work consists of 4 under-reinforced, properly cured RCC beams under two point loading test. One beam was loaded till failure which was considered the control beam for comparison. Other 3 beams were load till the appearance of initial crack which normally occurred at third-quarters of failure load and then repaired with different ratios and design of CFRP sheet strips. Afterwards, the repaired beams were loaded again till failure and the results were compared with control beam. Deflections and ultimate load were noted for all concrete beams. It was found out the use of CFRP sheet strips did increase the maximum load bearing capacity of cracked beams although their behavior was more brittle as compared with control beam.

Old age steel bridges mostly have various problems facing potentially catastrophic result. There is complex array of issues with the railway wrought iron bridges regarding their residual life. Road Cum Rail Bridge near Khushhal Garh is of wrought iron & crosses the River Indus. This bridge is 775 ft. long and consist of four deck truss spans i.e. a 303’-0” anchor arm, a 104’-8” east cantilever (Jand end) , a 261’-0” slung and a 104’-8” west cantilever span (Kohat end). The west cantilever is anchored deep into the rock by means of guys. The upper end of the guys is attached to the top boom while the lower end is connected to anchors of size 10’x 7’-6”x 4’. Roadway is supported on bottom booms of the trusses and railway track is on the top chords. The bridge was opened to traffic on 27th November, 1907. In the course of time this bridge showed some signs of distress, in December 2006, it was decided by the Pakistan Railways Authorities to carry out strength evaluation of this bridge. The task was awarded to a joint venture, Pakistan Railways Advisory and Consultancy Services (PRACS) and Multi-Dimensional Consultants (MDC, Lahore, to conduct field studies, carry out computed model analysis & suggest measures for the repair & rehabilitation of this bridge if required. For field testing, 30 strain gauges were installed at different critical locations of main members of truss. Tensile and compressive strain variation under standard test train were recorded and analyzed. Maximum tensile & compressive stresses in main members were assessed. 22.5 Ton axle group III engine were used with PR standard test train for the test. Stress range and number of loading cycles of the selected members were compared with Wohler Curves for residual fatigue life. On the basis of this comparison, it was concluded that bridge was safe under the loading given in Bridge Rules, 1971 Pakistan Railways & Pakistan Highways Code and residual life has been estimated.

Out of numerous serious problems that occur in reinforced concrete, formation of cracks and their propagation has its own say. Different types of cracks can form due to numerous reasons which include reinforcement corrosion, environmental effect, load impact and settlement of framework which can then affect the useful lifetime of any structure hence making the reinforced concrete structure less durable. Crack repairs, with the help of suitable materials, need to be done in order to reinstate the original strength of the structure. Water penetration test besides compression test were used to study the effectiveness of different materials used for repair work in current study. Results elaborated that polymer injection with materials available in local market can restore the actual strength of reinforced concrete elements and works more effectively as compared to other additives. It was found out through Water penetration test that water resistance was shown by all polymer injection materials.

Fiscal management and financial discipline are the key indicators of the resource utilization, economic development and sustained investment. It is a proven reality that the investment cannot be productive and sustainable, till the same is utilized economically, efficiently and prudently. The research paper under consideration, differs from routine and is not much engineering oriented rather it mainly focused on financial and fiscal management in the Government Departments. How professional and competent an engineer may be, but he cannot be a good financial manager and administrator, till he has a command over latest financial rules, codes and the management tools. However, generally the engineers lack in this area, depends upon the subordinate and resultantly face serious consequences. Their ignorance in the financial matter leads to misclassification, embezzlement and doubtful expenditure.

Image restoration from noisy observations is an inverse problem. Total variation (TV) is widely used to regularize this problem. TV preserves object boundaries better than a quadratic regularizer; however, it performs poor in low-textured image regions because it generates undesirable staircase artefacts. Furthermore, TV can preserve sharp horizontal and vertical edges; however, it causes the unnecessary smoothing of edges at an angle other than 0o or 90o. This problem arises because TV minimizes the gradient magnitude. Therefore, to preserve sharp boundaries, the design of an efficient variational regularizer is crucial. This paper presents a novel regularizer for the denoising of multi-channel vector valued image. The proposed regularizer uses horizontal, vertical as well as diagonal derivatives, and imposes the intensity continuity of partial image derivatives at each pixel of the underlying image. Experiments reveal that the proposed regularizer preserves edges and object boundaries better than TV based regularizers. This regularizer is also able to reduce undesirable staircase artefacts produced by TV in flat image regions.