PEC embraces contractors; will they reciprocate?

on 17/01/2023

Difference of opinion on numerous issues apart, the governing body (GB) of Pakistan Engineering Council (PEC) finally demonstrated unanimously in its latest moot holding its spirit high to come up to the expectations of the engineering community and the industry as a whole.
This expression has resulted in the council’s effort to woo a major portion of contractors to remain under its umbrella so that the construction industry is developed on modern lines and also the council is able to retain its regulatory role in the country.
With the active support of constructors, the moot reached a consensus that the Construction Industry Development Board (CIDB) should be set up under the umbrella of the council.
The meeting mandated Engr Najeeb Haroon, the Chairman PEC to present the case with the Planning Ministry which the contractors wished should be their parent department after their break up with the council.
PEC has already allocated Rs.200 million for CIDB, no matter the issue is yet to be settled in the forthcoming meeting of the council with relevant ministries such as P&D and MoS&T.
Despite GB’s consensus as regards board under the council and eventual pursuance of constructors at large, some PEC officials claim some known contractors continue to be obstinate. They still want contractors to be stripped of the council.
But still, many of PEC’s elected members believe the ice has melted to a great extent and it is resulted by a realization on the part of a large number of contractors.
The contractors’ community has many issues with the council and of which some are justified, a GB member says. “But the issue aggravated by the conduct of council in previous tenures because the attitude of the council towards them was not encompassing.”
Now that the contractors have been got in touch with and also they have realized that breaking away from the council may not bring any benefits, they have softened their stand.
Apart from the factors which have caused a change, the development of the construction industry as per many experts does not depend on contractors only. Keeping contractors under the thumb of bureaucracy would do no good and instead making endeavors with help of the council makes sense.
Recent signals from the council have surely brought some relief for the engineers across Pakistan that the council is more likely to live and work for the betterment of the engineering community in the country.
Also, it will transmit signals to Engr. Haroon’s opponents who reacted sharply to the possible establishment of CIDB out of the ambit of PEC that the interest of engineers and the council is being safeguarded.
Engr Haroon is said to be in touch with his predecessors including Engr Jawed Salim Qureshi whose strategy had worked, at least until his tenure, to stop efforts of stripping contractors of the council.n

BOP Madadgar launches zero-carbon shelters for flood affectees

on 16/01/2023

The recent devastating rains and flash floods have inundated vast areas across Pakistan. The Bank of Punjab (BOP) recently launched its employee volunteering program called BOPMadadgar which has been designed to give our employees an opportunity to participate in uplifting society and doing good for the public at large.
BOP, under the flag of BOPMadadgar, is constructing permanent basic shelters using eco-friendly building materials in flood-affected areas. These shelters are durable and have inherent climate-resilient properties, enabling them to withstand flooding. Additionally, these shelters are extremely low cost, easy to construct, and with virtually zero carbon footprint. The houses have the flexibility of being disassembled and moved for making permanent construction. BOP raised over Rs. 3 billion in various flood relief funds which is probably the highest amount any bank collected from the general public.
Zafar Masud (President & CEO – BOP) along with senior members of the management visited the campsite of BOPMadadgar’s maiden flood relief activities in Rojhan city. The president oversaw the construction activities being done for the flood affectees. He met the BOPMadadgar team along with artisans involved in the construction work. He also met the flood-affected families which have shifted to the shelters provided by the bank.
The local administration has identified 25 families who are being provided shelter homes through the BOPMadadgar Program. The staff volunteers, from D.G. Khan and Multan, after being provided with necessary training by artisans from Heritage Foundation are constructing the shelters in Rojhan.
The bank is also supporting the construction of zero-carbon shelters in Pono village of Mirpurkhas, Sindh for which the work was started before the flooding. The houses built with the support of BOP withstood the floods and provided shelters to people who lost their homes. Due to the efforts of the bank, the local villagers now refer to their village as BOP Pono village.
Speaking at the occasion, Zafar Masud (President & CEO – BOP) said, “Today, we have come to Rojhan city for the inaugural project of BOPMadadgar. BOP’s branch in the city has also been damaged but the staff is present today to support the flood affectees.”
He further added, “BOP will further expand its rehabilitation activities in other provinces of the country. I’m thankful to the artisans of the Heritage Foundation for coming all the way from Karachi to participate and train our staff and local population in the construction work. BOP will further expand the scope of this campsite by providing healthcare facilities, the Dastarkhwan project, etc. The members of the 25 families have also participated in the construction of shelters so that they can help others in building similar shelters and earn livelihoods as well. Overall, it has been an emotional, yet rewarding, experience for all of us at BOP.” — PR

Modeling and Technical Approaches of Heat Transfer Engr. Dr. Muhammad Nawaz Iqbal

on 16/01/2023

When heat conduction within an item is substantially faster than heat conduction across the object’s boundary, the lumped capacitance model is a popular approximation in transient conduction that can be employed. This is an approximation strategy that lowers one aspect of the object’s transient conduction system to an equivalent steady-state system. In that example, the approach assumes that the temperature inside the item is perfectly uniform, even if it varies over time. Heat transfer is used in the operation of a wide range of equipment and systems. In a variety of situations, heat-transfer principles can be employed to maintain, increase, or decrease temperature. Many areas, including automotive engineering, thermal management of electronic devices and systems, climate control, insulation, materials processing, chemical engineering, and power station engineering, utilize heat transfer methods.
Thermal insulators are materials that are specially engineered to inhibit heat transmission through conduction, convection, or both. Thermal resistance is a heat property and a measurement of how well an object or material resists heat flow (heat per time unit or thermal resistance) when exposed to a temperature differential. Radiance, also known as spectrum radiance, is a measurement of how much radiation passes through or is emitted. Radiant barriers are materials that reflect radiation, reducing the passage of heat from sources of radiation. Radiant barriers are not always good insulators and vice versa. Metal, for example, is a great reflector but a terrible insulator.
A heat exchanger is used to transport heat more efficiently or to dissipate heat. Refrigeration, air conditioning, space heating, power generation, and chemical processing all require heat exchangers. A car’s radiator is an example of a heat exchanger, in which the heated coolant fluid is cooled by air flowing over the radiator’s surface.
A heat sink is a component that transfers heat from a solid material to a fluid medium like air or liquid. Heat sinks include heat exchangers in refrigeration and air conditioning systems, as well as a car’s radiator. Another heat-transfer device is a heat pipe, which uses thermal conductivity and stage progress to effectively transmit heat between two solid interfaces. The flow of fluids over the body’s surface drives heat transmission by convection. A liquid or a gas can be used as a convective fluid. The convection method for heat transmission from the body’s outer surface is influenced by the body’s surface area, air velocity, and the temperature difference between the skin’s surface and the surrounding air. The body’s normal temperature is around 37 degrees Celsius. When the temperature of the surroundings is much lower than the typical body temperature, heat transfer is easier. Heat transfer principles in engineering systems can be used in the human body to identify how the body transfers heat. The constant metabolism of foods in the body produces heat, which gives energy to the body’s systems. In order to maintain proper biological processes, the human body must maintain a constant interior temperature.
When water vapor is introduced to the surrounding air, evaporative cooling occurs. The energy required to evaporate the water is extracted from the air as sensible heat and transferred into latent heat, while the enthalpy of the air remains unchanged. The amount of heat required to evaporate a liquid is referred to as latent heat, and it originates from the liquid as well as the surrounding gas and surfaces.
The process through which a body loses heat through radiation is known as radiative cooling. The influence of emitted energy on the Earth’s energy budget is significant. It refers to the mechanism through which long-wave (infrared) radiation is produced to adjust the assimilation of short-wave (apparent) energy from the Sun in the Earth-atmosphere system.

New Gwadar Intl Airport to be operational by Sep 2023

on 16/01/2023

The most modern and the country’s largest $246m New Gwadar International Airport (NGIA), built at an area of 4,300 acres, will be operational by September 2023 to welcome local and international flights at the port city.
The development of the airport was being expedited at different stages as the passenger terminal building of the project would be completed by June 2023, work related to air traffic control by March 2023, and the overall construction of the airport would be finished before September 2023.
The New Gwadar International Airport (NGIA) was being managed and operated by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) which was owned by a tripartite venture between Pakistan, Oman, and China that would handle domestic and international operations.
The airport development is a part of the gigantic China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) project, which is a cornerstone of China’s One Belt One Road (OBOR) initiative.
The biggest in Pakistan, the NGIA would also become the nation’s second airport capable of handling A380 aircraft upon its commissioning in 2022.
It will stimulate the development of the Gwadar peninsula and boost trade between Pakistan and China, hence transforming the geopolitical status of the region into the geo-economic hub of investment and trade opportunities.
The airport would be operated and developed as per the open sky policy under the guidance of the CAA. The New Gwadar International Airport project was initiated as an early harvest high-priority project of the CPEC program in 2014. — APP

Pakistan floods 2022:
why Pakistan’s mobile network collapsed
A report exposes fragility of telecommunications
infrastructure and structural weaknesses

on 16/01/2023

The failure of Pakistan’s mobile network–both call and data has exposed the fragility of Pakistan’s telecommunications infrastructure, and the weaknesses of the broader structural environment within which mobile networks operate, says a report appeared on the website of Tabadlab that seeks to understand, interpret and analyze how change happens.
The report coauthored by Naeha Rashid, Maira Sheikh, and Alina Khan says: the failure in the country’s foundational digital layer was triggered by the floods, but the real problem goes deeper.
It says without immediate intervention, the industry is prone to collapse. Such a collapse would devastate not just Pakistan’s broader digital transformation journey, but also the lives of Pakistan’s 195 million telecommunications subscribers and 123 million broadband subscribers.
Employing PTA’s data the report reveals that In the wake of the floods, a total of 3386 cell sites were marked inactive across flood-impacted provinces, resulting in suspensions in mobile connectivity and internet services. The affected areas included Chitral, Swat, Upper and Low Dir, Tank, D.I Khan, Zhob, Killa Saifullah, Killa Abdullah, Quetta, Loralai, Khuzdar, Panjgur, Ghotki, Sukkur and Khairpur.
This inactivity, the report writes thousands of affectees experienced intermittent connectivity, making it difficult for them to contact loved ones or reach out to relief teams.
The report says the connectivity failures at the time of the floods are largely associated with structural and technical damages to core infrastructure.
Pakistan has six main fibre optic cables covering 130,000 km to 150,000 km powering both fixed broadband as well as mobile broadband and are approximately 50,633[a] cell towers. Only 5% of towers are connected to the fibre optic network which is significantly lower than the international standard of 40%.
In the aftermath of the floods, several cuts in the fibre optic network were reported making several cell sites inactive. While the PTA shared that the total number of inactive cell sites were reduced from 3,386 to 135 many of the remaining inactive sites – specifically those in Balochistan and Sindh – are still underwater and cannot be accessed for repairs.
Relief efforts are likely to further worsen this picture. Pakistan’s fibre optic network runs under highways and railway tracks, many of which were washed away because of heavy flooding. Diverting water flow requires digging roads and building trenches using heavy machinery, which can create further damage to the fibre optic network. As we have already seen, damage to one part of the fibre optic cable can digitally paralyse a much greater area since limited alternatives are available.
While the floods’ impact on infrastructure is undeniable, connectivity interruptions over the last few weeks are both a consequence of the floods, and a reflection of the fragile state of our telecommunications sector. Had the underlying infrastructure been more robust, the industry would have been much more resilient in the face of a single large-scale event. However, the issues go deeper and have been materializing for some time.
Despite significant demand for mobile broadband services – which has translated into 108% growth in subscriptions over the last five years – serious issues plague the telecommunications sector. Beyond the floods, a digital emergency is at hand for all actors in space.
The report further says: Financial results from the last few years show that, though both top line revenue and the customer base are largely increasing, the rate of growth has slowed down for almost all major players.
Like the big MNOs, users are also suffering, with individuals experiencing decreased quality mobile broadband: jitters rose by 19%, and latency has also increased by 8%. This means that not only are there higher fail rates, but people on the ground are also experiencing slower internet speeds in real terms.
In a context where average download and upload speeds are diverging increasingly from global averages, the declining customer experience of mobile broadband is a serious concern. In 2022, Pakistan’s ranking on the Speed Test Global Index for mobile broadband went down 7 rankings from 113 to 120 in the world.
As the data shows, the report says the telecommunications industry is not just fragile and prone to collapse in the face of natural disasters. It is also on the decline both from a business and user point of view. — ERMD