The study examines the role of investing in self-generation in mitigating the outage loss and evaluates the outage loss differential among firms that invested in self-generation and those that did not using World Bank Enterprise Survey data collected from firms operating in 13 Sub-Saharan African countries. The results show that though self-generation has reduced the amount of outage loss for firms that have invested in self-generation, these firms continue to face higher unmitigated outage loss compared to firms without such investment. Firms that have invested in self-generation would have incurred 36–99% higher than their current outage loss had they not been engaged in such investment. Likewise, firms that did not invest in self-generation would have reduced their outage loss by 2–24% had they been engaged in self-generation. Thus, the study recommends a differential supply interruption to be followed by public authorities based on firm’s degree of vulnerability to power interruptions.

In this paper, we formulate and study a new fractional-order SIS epidemic model with fear effect of an infectious disease and treatment control. The existence and uniqueness, nonnegativity and finiteness of the system solutions for the proposed model have been analysed. All equilibria of the model system are found, and their local and also global stability analyses are examined. Conditions for fractional backward and fractional Hopf bifurcation are also analysed. We study how the disease control parameter, level of fear and fractional order play a role in the stability of equilibria and Hopf bifurcation. Further, we have established our analytical results through several numerical simulations.

The alcohol and sugar industry in Brazil uses a feedstock for sucrose extraction, resulting in waste production, one of them being the sugarcane bagasse. A possible relocation for the use of this residue, produced in millions of tons annually, would be its use in the production of carbonaceous materials, such as activated carbon (AC). The purpose of this study was the production of activated carbon using a faster, simpler and more efficient process with low energy requirements and chemical reagents to obtain a material with a high surface area. The AC samples were prepared by chemical activation with ZnCl₂ and carbonization at 600 °C in an oxygen-limiting atmosphere. The average specific surface area of the samples, estimated by the BET method, was 1544 m² g⁻¹ and the average pore size was 2.6 nm. The surface morphologies of the ACs were characterized using SEM analysis, which showed that the surfaces were irregular, with cracks, pores. The solids were also characterized by FTIR, presenting mainly stretching bands corresponding to O–H, C–O, and C=C groups. EPR analysis showed a resonance line characteristic of an organic free radical with g ~ 2.0031, which is typical of free radicals centered on carbon atoms. The material efficiency for removal of aromatic organic pollutants was evaluated in continuous-flow adsorption tests with the antibiotic amoxicillin. The method provided very satisfactory results, reducing the concentration of the antibiotic from an initial value of 1.37 × 10⁻³ mol L⁻¹ to about 3.5 × 10⁻⁸ mol L⁻¹. The concentration of the antibiotic in water, after adsorption, was therefore reduced by four to five orders of magnitude, confirming the potential application of the materials prepared in this work for the removal of antibiotics residues from the environment.

This study was designed to analyse the interaction of household surveys and electricity consumption in Turkey. We used the micro-data set of the Household Budget Survey published by TurkStat for the period 2002–2017. A statistical method and an optimisation method, namely Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Analytical Hierarchical Processing (AHP), were used to explore the correlations between the components of the household surveys. The first 35 variables among 50 variables were extracted using PCA, and expert opinions validated 26 of 35 ranked using the AHP method. The Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) model, constructed using the input variables defined by expert opinions, gave better prediction results than the ANN model defined using the PCA outcome. ANN sensitivity analysis was conducted to examine the prediction for the components that were validated by AHP evaluations. The results show that dwelling characteristics had more impact on electricity utilisation than did ownership of appliances. It was also discovered that the amount of total expenditure had a negligible impact on electricity consumption.

Bamboo chip (BC) biomass was used as an alternative precursor for producing high surface area and mesoporous bamboo chip activated carbon using KOH activation with pyrolysis process. Various characterization methods were employed to study the morphological characteristics, material crystallinity, surface area property, elemental composition, and surface functional group of the bamboo chip activated carbon (BCAC). The Brunauer–Emmett–Teller analysis showed that the bamboo chip activated carbon has a high surface area (720.69 m²/g) and mesoporous structure (mean pore diameter 7.32 nm). The adsorption property of bamboo chip activated carbon for the removal of methylene blue (MB) from aqueous media was evaluated. The effect of key adsorption parameters such as the bamboo chip activated carbon dose (A: 0.02–0.1 g/L), pH (B: 3–10), temperature (C: 30–50 °C), and time (D: 5–20 min) was optimized using a response surface methodology–Box–Behnken design. The kinetics of adsorption obeyed a pseudo-first order. The adsorption equilibrium was well described by the Freundlich isotherm model. The maximum adsorption capacity (q _m) of MB dye was found to be 305.3 mg/g at 40 °C. The MB dye adsorption mechanism onto bamboo chip activated carbon surface indicates various dye–adsorbent interactions: electrostatic attraction, π–π interaction, and H-bonding. This study demonstrates the utility of bamboo chip as a biomass precursor for the efficient synthesis of activated carbon with favorable cationic dye adsorption properties.

Consumption of fossil fuels has triggered the worldwide awareness to attain socioeconomic and environmental sustainability, particularly by enhancing renewable energy use and mitigating the environmental adversities, in tandem. Against this background, this paper aimed to investigate the impacts of promoting ICT trade, through liberalization of the associated trade barriers, on the prospects of undergoing renewable energy transition and limiting environmental degradation by curbing CO₂ emissions across six South Asian economies. The overall results from the econometric analyses, in a nutshell, confirm that higher degrees of openness to ICT trade lead to greater consumption of renewable energy, improve energy use efficiency levels and enhance access to cleaner cooking fuels. However, ICT trade fails to elevate the renewable energy shares in aggregate final energy consumption figures in South Asia. Besides, ICT trade is also seen to boost CO₂ emissions across this region; although the impacts seem to reverse upon enhancement in renewable energy consumption levels along with liberalization of the ICT trade barriers. Thus, these results impose key policy implications for the South Asian governments for simultaneously ensuring energy security and sustaining environmental well-being across South Asia.