Designing of a Co2 Emission Calculator

The first part of this chapter will focus on rationalizing the selection of various technologies for the development of this project. In this, the usage of CodeIgniter framework and the NetBeans IDE for the development of the web application and the designing of a CO2 emission calculator as opposed to the usage of a CO2 emission detecting equipment will be analyzed. The latter part of the literature review will be devoted to identifying the research gap by analyzing the existing products.

Analyzing the Technologies Used

For this project, CodeIgniter framework has been used to develop the web application using PHP since it has advanced features which are facilitated by the availability of a rich set of functionality that increase the speed of website development. (www.tutorialspoint.com,2018) Few of those features are listed below.

§ Model-View-controller-based System

MVC is a software approach which separates application logic from presentation. Practically, it permits the web pages to contain minimal scripting since the presentation is separate from the PHP scripting. (www.tutorialspoint.com, 2018)

§ Extremely Light Weight

It easily collaborates with the search engines and speeds up the opening of the website.

§ Query Builder database support

This gives you access to a Query Builder class which allows information to be retrieved, inserted and updated in your database with minimal scripting. (Codeigniter.com, 2018)

NetBeans IDE which is an open source software development platform that provides a great set of tool for PHP has also been used in making this project. The favorable features of it such as fast and smart code editing, easy and efficient project management and rapid user interface development, has been the reason for its usage in the development of this web application. (Netbeans.org, 2018)

The determination of a reliable and a realistic method to find the amount of CO2 emission of the relevant companies was one of the major decisions that had to be taken in planning the project. For that purpose first, the existing CO2 emission detection techniques were examined. Two main types of CO2 sensors were found in the market, Namely; Nondispersive Infrared (NDIR) CO2 Sensors and chemical gas sensors. The former type of these was used to detect CO2 in a gaseous environment by its characteristic absorption and consisted of a light tube, an infrared source, infrared detector and a wavelength filter, while the latter uses three electrodes and an electrolyte where carbon dioxide passes through the chemical sensor to produce a measurable electrochemical reaction. (eBay, 2018) But the usage of these techniques was not realistic for the project due to its high cost, it’s not-capability of measuring such emission inside the factories while the process continues and due to the inability to obtain permission from the sample factories to carry out such scientifical tests in relation to their processes.

Therefore it has been decided to compliment the website with a CO2 emission calculator which will be based on the scientifical data obtained from reliable sources in the internet which gives the amount of CO2 emission within a unit time (for example 1 min) by various models of machineries and vehicles that are used in the tea manufacturing process. PHP will be used to develop this calculator, and formulas will be designed in such a way that the administrator can enter the actual figures based on the actual data obtained through research such as the number of machines and the operating duration as other variables in the calculation.