Moringa oleifera is a plant with various benefits to mankind from its root until leaves.
From food to biofuel applications, all parts are useful for daily uses. In this research, the pod husk
was examined to determine the possibility of producing ethanol. The pod husks were dried and used in
two forms; one is grinded into powder, and the other is cut within 5 x 5 x 2 mm. About 10 grams of
Moringa oleifera pod husk was put into a conical flask and added with distilled water up to 250 mL.
The pre-treatment was made by adding an alkaline solution, NaOH, where the pH of the sample was
adjusted to (4.5, 5.0, and 5.5) using H2SO4. The samples were autoclaved at a temperature of 120°C
for 2 hours before the samples were cooled to room temperature (25+/-2oC). Baker’s yeast
(Saccharomyces cerevisiae) was prepared with different concentrations (1g, 5g, and 10g) and added
to the samples for fermentation process that took place in the incubator shaker at a temperature of
36°C, for a period of 72 hours. The bioethanol concentration was measured using High Performance
Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) with a refractive index detector and REZEX ROA-Organic Acid
HPLC Column using 0.05 N H2SO4 as the mobile phase. The bioethanol produced from Moringa
oleifera pod husk was 8.400 g/L using 1g/L yeast, and the fermentation took place at pH 4.5 for the
sample size of 5 x 5 x 2 mm. The results showed that Moringa oleifera pod husk can be introduced as
a new material for bioethanol production in Malaysia and other tropical countries where this tree is
available
We experimentally investigate the performance of L-band multiwavelength Brillouin-Raman fiber laser (MBRFL) under forward and backward pumped environments utilizing a linear cavity. A short length of 1.18 km dispersion compensating fiber is used as a nonlinear gain medium for both Brillouin and Raman gain. Experimental results indicate that the gain in the copumped laser configuration is higher than the gain in the counterpumped configuration. A stable and constant number of Brillouin Stokes lines up to 23 Stokes, with channel spacing of 0.08 nm and more than 20 dB of optical signal to noise ratio, can be generated as well as tuning over 20 nm in the L-band region from 1570 to 1590 nm. The laser generating the Brillouin Stokes lines exhibits flat amplitude bandwidth and high average output power of 0.8 and 1.6 dBm for the copropagation and counterpropagation pumps, respectively. Moreover, the tuning range bandwidth of the MBRFL can be predicted from the oscillated Brillouin pump gain profile.
The optimization of thermophotovoltaic (TPV) cell efficiency is essential since it leads to a significant increase in the output power. Typically, the optimization of In0.53Ga0.47As TPV cell has been limited to single variable such as the emitter thickness, while the effects of the variation in other design variables are assumed to be negligible. The reported efficiencies of In0.53Ga0.47As TPV cell mostly remain
Monitoring the condition of transformer oil is considered to be one of the preventive maintenance measures and it is very critical in ensuring the safety as well as optimal performance of the equipment. Various oil properties and contents in oil can be monitored such as acidity, furanic compounds and color. The current method is used to determine the color index (CI) of transformer oil produces an error of 0.5 in measurement, has high risk of human handling error, additional expense such as sampling and transportations, and limited samples can be measured per day due to safety and health reasons. Therefore, this work proposes the determination of CI of transformer oil using ultraviolet-to-visible (UV-Vis) spectroscopy. Results show a good correlation between the CI of transformer oil and the absorbance spectral responses of oils from 300 nm to 700 nm. Modeled equations were developed to relate the CI of the oil with the cutoff wavelength and absorbance, and with the area under the curve from 360 nm to 600 nm. These equations were verified with another set of oil samples. The equation that describes the relationship between cutoff wavelength, absorbance and CI of the oil shows higher accuracy with root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.1961.