NIGERIAN CIVIL WAR: THE BIAFRAN INVASION OF MIDWEST AND INTER-GROUP RELATIONS IN THE REGION

Peaceful coexistence is a major challenge in a multi-ethnic region like the Midwest. After the creation of the region in 1963, ethnic distrust dominated the region's body politics. The Biafran invasion of Midwest remained one invent that heightened ethnic distrust in the region. Although, scholars have examined the invasion, the need to re-examine it arises from the fact that the event made ethnic antagonism among the groups in the region more intense than ever before. It is against this backdrop that this paper examines the Biafran invasion of Midwest and its implications on inter-group relations in the region. Relying on primary and secondary sources, the paper is of the opinion that the intense group antagonism and suspicion emanated from the fact that the Biafran incursion into Midwest caused division among the groups in the region. The groups that were loyal to the Nigerian Government opposed the groups that supported Biafra. The paper further argues that the ethnic tension was also as a result of the assumption by the non-Igbo groups in the region that Biafrans were in the region to promote the interest of the Igbo groups.

Design and Implementation of Energy Management System Using High Scale Scada

For energy deficit countries like Pakistan, an optimal energy management program is essential to make sure reliability in energy supply and discover energy saving opportunities by minimizing costs related to generation and transmission of energy. SCADA based management and supervision systems capitalize on the deployment of the on hand power management facility by interactive review of the electrical power network to check for system damages and outages. This thesis has contributed in low cost development and implementation of a Remote Terminal Unit (RTU) with provision of wireless connectivity with an aim to optimize the energy management system based on SCADA. This particular design of RTU is based on FPGA and its performance is better than commercially available RTUs based on Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) and it is also well comparable with other commercially available modern RTUs for power related applications. The characteristics and features of developed RTU have been verified by means of hardware testing. Moreover, a model for optimized energy management system was also proposed and demonstrated by means of simulations. The provision of wireless connectivity in the developed RTU has been optimized and benchmarking was also done for further verification. Initially, the modeling of the power system outages and the system adjustments using contingency analysis using PowerWorld simulator is discussed which is followed by consideration of optimal power flow (OPF) tool to determine effective system corrections to execute in either the base case followed by a primary contingency or any of the secondary contingencies. It also incorporates two major functionalities namely Minimum Cost and Minimum Control Change which are available in OPF. It is then supplemented by mathematical model for congestion management to prove that the power flow can be affected not only by either varying voltage magnitudes or the power angle but it can also be affected by changing reactance of the transmission line. Therefore, either power angle or voltage magnitude may be used for congestion management. An integrated framework has been proposed after the development of model for power system outages and adjustments, OPF and mathematical model for xiv congestion management. This framework can provide a simulation platform for detailed study of power system to overcome issues like execution of restoration scheme by adding renewable energy resources. For development of RTU, a comparative assessment of performance of both methodologies of RTU design is executed, one based on PLCs and other one based on FPGAs which finalized for development of RTU due to its better performance and reliability. The hardware implementation and verification of this RTU design is done using a starter kit based on XILINX Spartan-3 Series FPGA with 500K logic gates and the MHX-2400 frequency-hopping 2.4 GHz spread-spectrum communications module which had been examined and found suitable as Communication Interface Module for this development. The FPGA based RTU offers flexibility in terms of I/Os, CPU and radio related configurations and expansion can be accommodated quickly if needed as FPGA based designs are reconfigurable. The design of link optimization has been implemented using Radio Mobile Simulator, a well known simulation platform for point to multipoint link optimization. The data transmitted from RTU is being received through Communication Interface Module for data integrity and graphical representation for which further benchmarking is done for Data Communication Protocol to further verify that the proposed solution is well suited for optimized energy management in countries having shortfall of energy. The implementation practical RTU hardware using FPGA include design initialization, main system thread, design modeling and qualification, process synthesis, programming of device and integration of communication interface module (MHX-2400) which interfaced with Spartan 3E using header available on starter kit. Finally, simulation of field inputs (variation in load) and control outputs (circuit breaker and isolators) connected with RTU from test panels has been done in hardware testing phase which allows sample inputs to be varied over the entire input range using a Graphical User Interface (GUI) followed by the suggestions for future work so that the research work may be extended to integrate new features and tools to contribute in the developed RTU hardware.