SCHOOL OF POST GRADUATE STUDIES

This study examined the influence of practical Agricultural science activities on academic performance of public secondary school students of Ikpoba-Okha Local Government of Edo State. Five research questions guided this study, three questions were answered and two questions were hypothesized, the population of this study consist of 250 senior public secondary school students, the samples of this study was 20% of the total population which have a sample of 50students, pearson(r) was used to determine the level of reliability ,the instrument for data collection was questionnaire validated by the supervisor and other lecturers in the institute of Education, the reliability of the instrument was tested at 0.05 alpha level of significance using test retest method and a correlation coefficient of 0.90 was obtained. The data collected was inputted into the computer and analyzed using SPSS: mean and standard deviation. The study found out that practical agricultural science activities has influence on academic performance on public secondary school students, based on the findings, it was recommended that schools should design balanced timetable that allocate adequate time for both practical agricultural activities and academic subjects to prevent interference with student’s study.

In order to address the growing global energy demand and reduce the environmental impact from operating gas turbine power plants, the performance and how to improve existing gas turbine power plants need to be studied. In view of this, this research work aims at carrying out the thermodynamic and environmental analyses of Azura Edo Power Plant for design and off-design conditions. Ebsilon Software is a commercially accepted energy and mass balance tool for power plant modelling. The performance of the Azura Edo Power Plant at design and off-design conditions were modelled using Ebsilon Software and the simulation exercise was validated. Energy, exergy and environmental analyses were conducted using operating data collected from the power plant to evaluate the thermal efficiencies, heat rate, energy losses and exergy destruction of each major component of the power plant and carbon dioxide emission rates with the aid of MATLAB software. The effects of ambient air temperature on the thermodynamic and environmental performances were carried out. Preliminary analyses of the effect of integrating an inlet air cooling system and heat recovery steam generator (HRSG) for future consideration were conducted.