Xsitaaz Chadee

University of the West Indies, St. Augustine | UWI · Department of Physics

Fine flavor cocoa quality is significantly impacted by its postharvest drying process which can be enhanced through mathematical modeling. The objective of this study was to carry out the mathematical modeling of cocoa bean drying kinetics for a greenhouse dryer and considering intermittent drying. In this study, a natural convection solar greenhou...

Trinidad and Tobago, a hydrocarbon economy and a Caribbean small island developing state (SIDS), transitioned from oil to 100% natural gas as a feedstock in its power generation sector in the 1980's. The island state is now entering its second energy transition to include renewables in its power generation sector to support the fulfilment of its na...

Small island developing states (SIDS) are the lowest emitters of greenhouse gases yet are the most vulnerable to the impacts of global climate warming. Many islands, such as the Caribbean islands, identified solar photovoltaics as a technology for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from their electricity sector. However, prefeasibility economic stud...

ABSTRACT Trinidad and Tobago is predominantly a gas based economy. Legacy arrangements with the government and the power generation sector has resulted in a high level of subsidization of the electricity cost. Consequently, the present lowest cost is USD$0.04 /KWh. These low retail prices of electricity from natural gas-powered electricity generati...

The tilted S-shaped utility function proposed in Prospect Theory (PT) relied fundamentally on the geometrical notion that there is a discontinuity between gains and losses, and that individual preferences change relative to a reference point. This results in PT having three distinct parameters; concavity, convexity and the reference point represent...

Transitioning from heavy carbon fuels such as coal and oil to lighter carbon fuels and renewable energy is necessary to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to keep global temperatures less than 2 °C above pre-industrial levels. This study considers the transition from full natural gas power generation to include renewables via utility-scale photovoltai...

This paper investigates the conflicting and contrasting views between two prominent schools of thought (SOT), the conventional project management empirical school and the incoming behavioural and psychological sciences, to explain the cost overrun phenomenon in transportation infrastructure projects. Although theories within these SOTs seem to coex...

The concept of ‘Lock-In’, or the escalating cost of overcommitment on a project to a failing course of action, has unforeseeable implications in project management. This paper presents a case study on the occurrence and consequences of lock-in within the context of public sector housing projects in a small island developing state (SIDS). It demonst...

Underestimating costs in major public sector social infrastructure development projects is a highly contested and problematic issue. Several gaps exist in the identification of root causes of cost overruns. Behavioural science academics advocate political and psychological explanations as root causes for cost overruns against technical factors, suc...

Changes in temperature and precipitation can have direct effects on a country’s economic and sustainable development. This study presents the historical trends in daily extreme temperature and precipitation indices for Barbados, a Caribbean island, for the period 1969–2017. Linear trends were determined on monthly, seasonal, and annual indices deri...

Seasonal rainfall in the Caribbean Basin is known to be modulated by sea surface temperature anomalies (SSTAs) in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and particularly those in the Equatorial Pacific and Atlantic and the Tropical North Atlantic. However, little is known about how these major oceans influence the seasonal precipitation of individual sma...

Trends in extreme temperature and rainfall were analyzed for two Caribbean islands in close proximity: Tobago (Crown Point) and Trinidad (Piarco) for the most recent period 1985–2015 using daily data. Most annual extreme temperature indices at Crown Point show no significant warming. However, warming at Crown Point manifests during the wet season a...

Presently, Trinidad and Tobago and many other Caribbean islands are faced with a challenge of integrating renewable energy into their energy sector. A key factor towards successful integration of any renewable energy resource in the electricity sector is through good economic prospects. In this study, the levelized cost of that energy (LCOE) output...

Numerical wind mapping is currently the wind power industry's standard for preliminary assessments for sites of good wind resources. Of the various available numerical models, numerical weather prediction (NWP) models are best suited for modeling mesoscale wind flows across small islands. In this study, the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) NWP m...

Affordable renewable energy is one key criterion for the long-term economic growth of Caribbean small island countries. The southernmost Caribbean islands, Trinidad and Tobago, have one of the lowest electricity rates in the region due to an indigenous source of hydrocarbons. In this study, technical and economic assessments were conducted to deter...

The day-to-day variability of the atmospheric circulation over the Caribbean region is investigated in this work through the extraction of frequently occurring atmospheric circulation types. A two-stage cluster analysis technique using Ward’s agglomerative algorithm followed by the k-means algorithm was applied to daily circulation defined by the N...

The lack of dense, high quality, long-term in-situ wind data sets and wind resource maps for the Caribbean region is a major impediment to the development of wind energy projects. Thus, there is limited understanding of the large-scale near-surface wind climate and the regional wind resources. Through statistical analyses on 10 m level NCEP/DOE rea...

The standard air density of 1.225 kg m −3 is often used in determining the energy output of a wind turbine although the energy output is dependent on a site's air density. By using measurements of temperature, dew-point temperature, and pressure, we calculate the monthly air density of moist tropical climates at two sites in the small-island state...

The fractal dimension, Lyapunov-exponent spectrum, and predictability are analyzed for chaotic attractors in the atmosphere by analyzing the time series of daily wind speeds over the Caribbean region. It can be shown that this dimension is greater than 8. However, the number of data points may be too small to obtain a reliable estimate of the Grass...