College of Agriculture, Engineering and Science
Sub-communities within this community
Recent Submissions
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Seasonal and spatial distribution of heavy metals in surface water and sediments of Msunduzi river, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.
(2017)Some physicochemical parameters and heavy metal concentrations of surface water as well as sediments in the Msunduzi River were investigated to provide information on the spatial and seasonal characteristic patterns of ... -
Chlorine dioxide and ozone facilitated disinfection of selected bacteria in aqueous systems.
(2018)Chlorination is the most commonly used disinfection technology for the control of pathogenic microorganisms in drinking water or wastewater treatment. However, the reactions of chlorine with natural organic matter in ... -
New families of exact solutions for compact stars.
(2018)In this thesis we present new families of exact solutions to the Einstein and Einstein- Maxwell eld equations which are relevant in the description of highly compact stellar objects. We rst impose a linear equation of ... -
Characterisation of quantum channels in plasmonic metamaterials and bulk optical systems.
(2018)Quantum channels are key to our understanding of how quantum information can be processed and transmitted. In this respect, over the past decade light has become an important carrier of quantum information. More recently, ... -
Gender classification using facial components.
(2018)Gender classification is very important in facial analysis as it can be used as input into a number of systems such as face recognition. Humans are able to classify gender with great accuracy however passing this ability ... -
Synthesis, characterization and reactivity of metal modified heteropolyacid catalysts for organic transformation reactions.
(2018)In the present investigation, eco-friendly, sustainable and recyclable heteropolyacid catalysts have been developed for a series of organic transformations such as the production of ethyl acetate by solvent free liquid ... -
Production of nanocellulose from renewable resources and conductivity measurements of polypyrrole hybrid nanocomposites.
(2018)The extraction of nanocellulose (NC) from i) bacterial cellulose (grown using "Symbiotic 'Colony' of Bacteria and Yeast" or SCOBY), ii) Whatman filter paper, and iii) hardwood pulp was successfully investigated in this ... -
Mathematical and numerical analysis of the discrete fragmentation coagulation equation with growth, decay and sedimentation.
(2018)The importance and need for solar energy man and living organisms cannot be overemphasised. It is therefore necessary to estimate the amount of solar radiation incident on South African surfaces and how it can be harnessed ... -
Mathematical and numerical analysis of the discrete fragmentation coagulation equation with growth, decay and sedimentation.
(2018)Fragmentation-coagulation equations arise naturally in many branches of engineering and science, the applications stretching from astrophysics, blood clotting, colloidal chemistry and polymer science to molecular beam ... -
A comparative study of metaheuristics for blood assignment problem.
(2018)The Blood Assignment Problem (BAP) is a real world and NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem. The study of BAP is significant due to the continuous demand for blood transfusion during medical emergencies. However, ... -
Detection and quantification of emerging contaminants in Mgeni and Msunduzi rivers by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.
(2018)This work concerns the development, optimization and validation of simple and affordable analytical methods for determination of different classes of emerging contaminants in environmental waters and solids. Occurrence ... -
Semi-tetrad decomposition of spacetime with conformal symmetry.
(2018)In this thesis, we study the kinematical and dynamical properties of a general spacetime that admits a conformal Killing vector. A 1+1+2 decomposition of the spacetime is performed using the fluid 4-velocity and a preferred ... -
First integrals for spherically symmetric shear-free perfect fluid distributions.
(2018)In this dissertation we study spherically symmetric shear-free spacetimes. In particular we analyse the integrability of and find exact solutions to the Emden- Fowler equation yxx = f(x)y2; which is the master equation ... -
Bounds on the extremal eigenvalues of positive definite matrices.
(2018)The minimum and maximum eigenvalues of a positive de nite matrix are crucial to determining the condition number of linear systems. These can be bounded below and above respectively using the Gershgorin circle theorem. ... -
Modelling of artificial intelligence based demand side management techniques for mitigating energy poverty in smart grids.
(2018)This research work proposes an artificial intelligence (AI) based model for smart grid initiatives (for South Africa and by extension sub-Saharan Africa, (SSA)) and further incorporates energy justice principles. Spanning ... -
Synthesis and antibacterial studies of new cadmium,silver and zinc dithiophosphonates.
(2018)A variety of dithiophosphonate and bis(dithiophosphonate) compounds were synthesised from the reaction between a dithiophosphetane disulfide dimer, [P(4-C6H4OMe)S(S)]2, commonly referred to as Lawesson’s Reagent (LR), and ... -
Evaluation of single and multiple missing data imputation techniques: a comparative application on BMI data.
(2017)Missing data are a common occurrence in various fields of data science and statistics. The research into missing data is one of the most important topics in applied statistics, especially in academic, government and ... -
Solutions of the Volterra integro-differential equation.
(2018)Integro-di erential equations has found extensive applications in the eld of engineering, sciences and mathematical modelling of various physical and biological phenomena. In this thesis we focus on the Volterra type ... -
Star formation as a function of environment in the MeerKAT Galaxy Clusters Legacy Survey.
(2023)Probing the star formation (SF) activity of cluster galaxies paves an important path towards the understanding of cluster evolution. This thesis presents the study of star formation rates (SFR) in clusters using ...