Lattice Boltzmann Model for Shallow Water Equation with Turbulence Modeling (LABSWETM) is used to study the flow patterns of sidewall friction effects. The lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) approach in recovery the macroscopic governing equation which is shallow water equation from the microscopic flow behavior of particle movement as described by kinetic theory is explored. With the solution of force term to be used in lattice Boltzmann equation, the boundary condition of LBM is explored. With the use of bed and wall friction coefficients, the importance of Manning’s coefficient in determining the outcome of flow patterns simulation is explained. For model verification, the model represents a straight channel with a circular cavity attached to it. The result of this simulation includes the water circulation patterns, cross-section of average velocity distribution, and water depth. For validation, the cross-sections of the model in term of velocity vectors are compared against alternative numerical and experimental data.
Mixed microbial culture used in this study was developed from sludge that was taken from local textile wastewater treatment tank. Acclimatization process was performed before starting the biodegradation experiment to obtain a microbial culture with high degradation properties. Kinetic studies by the mixed microbial culture were determined quantitatively for the model pollutant, Reactive Black 5 (RB 5). By using Michaelis-Menten model, the constants were found to be 11.15 mg l-1 h -1 and 29.18 mg l-1 for Vm and Km respectively. The values of kinetic constants for Monod model were found to be 33.11 mg l-1 cell h-1 for the maximum specific microbial growth rate, µm and 86.62 mg l-1 for Monod constant, Ks. The effects of process parameters such as pH, inoculum size and initial dye concentration on the biodegradation of azo dye, RB 5 were systematically investigated. Maximum removal efficiencies observed in this study were 75% for pH 6, 100% for 15% inoculum concentration and 75% for 20 ppm of initial dye concentration.
Soil properties are very crucial for civil engineers to differentiate one type of soil from another and to predict its mechanical behavior. However, it is not practical to measure soil properties at all the locations at a site. In this paper, an estimator is derived to estimate the unknown values for soil properties from locations where soil samples were not collected. The estimator is obtained by combining the concept of the ‘Inverse Distance Method’ into the technique of ‘Kriging’. The method of Lagrange Multipliers is applied in this paper. It is shown that the estimator derived in this paper is an unbiased estimator. The partiality of the estimator with respect to the true value is zero. Hence, the estimated value will be equal to the true value of the soil property. It is also shown that the variance between the estimator and the soil property is minimized. Hence, the distribution of this unbiased estimator with minimum variance spreads the least from the true value. With this characteristic of minimum variance unbiased estimator, a high accuracy estimation of soil property could be obtained.
In this study, Hydrolysate from angelwing clam (Pholas orientalis) was produced at 0, 1, 2 and 3 hrs and E/S ratio of 0.5 and 3% using alcalase where the pH and temperature were kept constant at pH 8.5 and 60°C, respectively. The hydrolysates were analysed for antioxidant and functional properties such as solubility, emulsifying properties and water and oil holding capacity. Degree of hydrolysis (DH), yield, functional and antioxidant properties were influenced by the hydrolysis time and E/S ratio. Higher enzyme concentration (E/S 3%) and longer hydrolysis time increased the DH. Yield was higher at E/S 3% but reduced with hydrolysis time. Longer hydrolysis time produced more soluble hydrolysate and higher metal chelating activity but lower in emulsifying properties and DPPH activity. Higher enzyme concentration resulted in increase only in solubility and metal chelating activity. This study revealed that enzymatic hydrolysis using alcalase should be performed at shorter hydrolysis time using intermediate concentration of enzyme (E/S between 0.5 to 3%) in order to produce angelwing clam hydrolysate with collectively good functional and antioxidant properties
Unripe and ripe bilimbi (Averrhoa bilimbi. L) were ground and the extracted juices were partially purified by ammonium sulfate precipitation at the concentrations of 40 and 60% (w/v). The collected proteases were analysed for pH, temperature stability, storage stability, molecular weight distribution, protein concentration and protein content. Protein content of bilimbi fruit was 0.89 g. Protease activity of both the unripe and ripe fruit were optimum at pH 4 and 40ºC when the juice were purified at 40 and 60% ammonium sulfate precipitation. A decreased in protease activity was observed during the seven days of storage at 4°C. Molecular weight distribution indicated that the proteases protein bands fall between 10 to 220 kDa. Protein bands were observed at 25, 50 and 160 kDa in both the unripe and ripe bilimbi proteases purified with 40% ammonium sulfate, however, the bands were more intense in those from unripe bilimbi. No protein bands were seen in proteases purified with 60% ammonium sulfate. Protein concentration was higher for proteases extracted with 40% ammonium sulfate at both ripening stages. Thus, purification using 40% ammonium sulfate precipitation could be a successful method to partially purify proteases from bilimbi especially from the unripe stage.
This study aimed to understand the problems faced by self-planning
travellers when they plan for a trip by searching travel information from
the Internet and propose a system to facilitate the self-planning travellers
to obtain useful travel information. An online survey was conducted via
social media to understand the problems, the search criteria and types of
content of travel itinerary needed in facilitating the planning. A total of
65 responses were collected. The results showed that there were too many
unrelated information on the Web and travellers were unsure of where to
start the search. Also, the result revealed that the search criteria needed to
generate travel itinerary were travel date, travel duration, travel country
and travel budget. Finally, flight schedule, hotel accommodation, sightseeing
places, travelling route and things to do were the information required by
travellers for their travel itineraries. Based on the results, a travel itinerary
recommendation system named eTravelPlanner is proposed.
Storytelling is considered as an interactive social arts that uses word and
gestures to reveal the elements and images of a story while engaging the
listener's imagination. Multimedia based digital storytelling learning
approach provides interesting, interactive, engaging and multisensory
learning experience to children. Children explore new experience and
scenarios as new stories are being told. This study concentrates on
determining the best combination of elements for designing effective digital
storytelling applications specifically for the usage of dyslexic children.
Dyslexic children are known to have a common learning difficulty that can
cause problems with reading, writing, spelling and comprehension. These
applications are design with the objective to help in improving dyslexic
children ability in readings and comprehensions. Four elements were
derived from extensive literature studies. The elements are multimedia
components, multi-sensory instructional approach, emotional design and
games design. The relationship among all the elements were determine
and described in details as it will be used to contribute to the design and
development of the application in further works. The strength of this study
is it models the combinations of technology, psychology and instructional
approach as a support components for developing an effective digital story
telling learning application for dyslexic children.
Text localisation determines the location of the text in an image. This process
is performed prior to text recognition. Localising text on shop signage is
a challenging task since the images of the shop signage consist of complex
background, and the text occurs in various font types, sizes, and colours.
Two popular texture features that have been applied to localise text in
scene images are a histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) and speeded up
robust features (SURF). A comparative study is conducted in this paper
to determine which is better with support vector machine (SVM) classifier.
The performance of SVM is influenced by its kernel function and another
comparative study is conducted to identify the best kernel function. The
experiments have been conducted using primary data collected by the
authors. Results indicate that HOG with quadratic kernel function localises
text for shop signage better than SURF.
This paper presents the development of a Graphical User Interface (GUI)
for calculating the sum of nail-fold (NF) and distal interphalangeal joint
(DIP) ratios for all ten fingers. The sum of NF:DIP ratios for all ten fingers
leads to the Digital Index (DI) that was used as the measure for identifying
and determining the presence of finger clubbing symptom. This GUI system
was developed to serve as a simple and user-friendly interface for clinicians
to calculate DI value of patients in a busy clinic practice. It is also equipped
with the capability to keep the patient’s past diagnosis medical check-up
data for future monitoring purposes. The result shows that the developed
system helps the clinicians to perform calculation of DI value and identify
the presence of finger clubbing in a very short time. The average time taken
to measure both NF and DIP circumferences using Finger Clubbing Meter,
and to compute DI values using Digital Index Evaluation System (DIES)
interface is 6:36 ± 1:24 minutes (Mean ± SD) .This system is expected to
contribute in detecting the finger clubbing problem at early stage of so the
treatment can be performed immediately.
In recent years, the utility grid system is more essential for the power
transmission and distribution system because it cannot produce harmful
gases or no discharge waste in the environment. PWM based phase
synchronous invert systems are generally utilised in the high efficiency
energy supply, long distance and higher power quality. The inverter output
voltage depends on the coupling transformer, input sources and invert
controllers. An inverter using a three leg IGBT has been designed for utility
grid and simulated by using MATLAB2014a. In this paper, both sides of
the LCL filters are used for removing the DC ripple current, reducing the
noise and synchronous the output phase between inverter and the utility
grid. The PWM controller has created pulse signal to control the inverter,
electronic switches and precisely synchronise with grid line frequency. In
this system, the input DC voltage 500V, switching frequency 1.65 kHz, grid
frequency 50Hz, 20 km feeder (resistance, inductance and capacitance per
unit length, which are 0.1153, 1.05e-3 and 11.33e-09 ohms/km) with 30MW
three phase load (active and inductive reactive power which are 30e6 W
and 2e6 var) and also a balanced utility grid load of star configuration (00,
1200, and 2400 degree) are considered in the design. On the other hand,
three phase transformer consists of three signal phase transformers, normal
power 100e3, magnetization resistance and inductance which are 500 pu and
416.67pu are considered in this design. The system conversion efficiency
is 99.94% and 99.96%, while the total THD are 0.06% on inverter side
and 0.04% on grid side.
'Doa' is derived from Arabic word which means that one asks for the
fulfillment or a need or the cure of sickness from him/her. Having to search
and retrieve the relevant ‘doa’ for one needs at any particular time is
beneficial. There are some search and retrieval applications that require
using the exact match of the keyword search with the words stored in the
database. This approach leads to the retrieval of insignificant results as
users need to know the exact word to be searched. Therefore, this project
allows for partial keyword search that utilises N-gram method for the
search and retrieval process. Moreover, various words may have similar
meaning thus to increase the accuracy of the retrieved result, this project
compares the dice and overlap coefficient algorithms to find the synonyms
of the searched word. The result produced indicates that overlap coefficient
perform better than dice coefficient.
Palm Oil Mill Effluent (POME) is the largest contributor of biomass from
the palm oil milling industry. Conventional method of POME treatment
using ponding system should be improved because of huge land resource
requirement. In this study, microbubbles technology was applied to
understand the recovery rate of residual oil from POME at different
operating temperatures. Temperature for POME was set at 27 oC, 30 oC and
50 oC to determine the microbubble size distributions and characteristics at
different POME temperature. At each temperature, the size of microbubbles
was measured based on six size range; 50 μm. The results showed that at different
temperatures, the microbubbles size distribution varies and the smallest
group of microbubbles (
This research is about the natural product of coriander, or the Coriandrum species. The bioactive molecules and the health effects of this plant are constantly discussed. This paper is parallel with those publications, investigating the composition of the herb. The results of current study indicates that the Coriandrum seed is a source of fatty acids. From the publications, petroselinic acid or (6Z)-octadecenoic acid, is the major fatty acid in the coriander extracts. Previous articles reported on coriander’s chemical constituents, biological activities of the coriander’s seeds and leaves, as well as the coriander products in the retail. Indeed, coriander has a lot of uses either as a traditional medicines or spices. Different forms of coriander samples were subjected to a simple maceration by using chloroform. From the chromatographic purification of the seed crude extract, its component could include anisaldehyde, as one of the aromatic aldehyde. It is concluded that the lipid-containing fraction of the coriander seed could also consist of dipetroselin, a diglyceride.
The manganese oxides composite was synthesised via a simple molten salts method using a purchased MnCl2•2H2O as structuring agent. The structural details of the sample are important to be studied and previously rarely reported. It was characterised using X-ray diffraction (XRD) and data analyses including fitting process were done by Search-Match and Origin software. The Vesta software was used to draw a diagram crystal structure of the as-prepared composite. The experimental results indicated that the composite has two phases, Mn3O4 and MnO2, in value of approximately 74.22% and 25.78%, separately. The composite was highly crystalline with 74.69% compared to 25.31% for amorphous. The crystallite size of the Mn3O4 and MnO2 were calculated in an average of 22 and 24 nm, respectively. However, the lattice strain of the as-prepared composite was obtained between 7.1 x 10-3 and 7.4 x 10-3. The lattice parameters for the Mn3O4 compound was a = 5.705 Å and c = 9.473 Å, whereas a = 9.390 Å, b = 2.477 Å, c = 4.705 Å correspond to the MnO2 compound. The obtained results concluded that the composite containing two different types of system structure (tetragonal and orthorhombic).
The cloud point extraction (CPE) method was developed to determine the zinc prior to Ultraviolet-visible (UV-Vis) spectrophotometry detection. Triton X-100was applied as extractant based on the complexation reaction of Zn(II) ions with ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA). Under optimal conditions, the CPE was used to determine the concentration of zinc in canned food samples. The amounts of zinc found in the food samples were in the range of 0.005-0.007 mg/L with RSD of < 8 %. This confirmed that the proposed CPE method is suitable for the determination of zinc in food samples, indicating the concentration of zinc was within the permissible limit.
Composite panels were manufactured from kenaf particles and treated with two different alkali treatments using 2% NaOH and 2% KOH with resin contents of 8% and 10% of phenol formaldehyde (PF) at medium density of 650kg/m3. The objectives of this study were to determine the mechanical properties in terms of its modulus of rupture (MOR), modulus of elasticity (MOE) and internal bond (IB), and physical properties namely thickness swelling (TS) and water absorption (WA) of treated kenaf board. The mechanical and physical tests were performed according to the Malaysian Standard (MS1787:2004). The minimum requirements value for MOE, MOR and IB were 2000 MPa, 14 MPa and 0.45 MPa respectively for furniture grade particleboards for use in humid conditions (PF2). According to Malaysian specifications for physical properties, the maximum requirement for thickness swell is 15%. Results indicated that both treated boards with NaOH and KOH showed an increase in strength properties compared to untreated particleboard. Particleboard treated with KOH exhibited the highest MOR and MOE values, while board with NaOH treatment gave the highest IB value. The boards with treated particles gave better performance in terms of physical properties. There were no significant differences in mechanical properties (MOR, MOE and IB) and physical properties for the different alkali treatment. The values of bending strength and IB strength increased with an increase in resin content, while TS and WA increased with a decrease in resin content. In conclusion, NaOH and KOH treated kenaf particles improved board performance and could be considered as an alternative material for particleboard production.
Concepts from algebraic geometry such as cones and fans are related to toric varieties and can be applied to determine the convex polytopes and homogeneous coordinate rings of multivariate polynomial systems. The homogeneous coordinates of a system in its projective vector space can be associated with the entries of the resultant matrix of the system under consideration. This paper presents some conditions for the homogeneous coordinates of a certain system of bivariate polynomials through the construction and implementation of the Sylvester-Bèzout hybrid resultant matrix formulation. This basis of the implementation of the Bèzout block applies a combinatorial approach on a set of linear inequalities, named 5-rule. The inequalities involved the set of exponent vectors of the monomials of the system and the entries of the matrix are determined from the coefficients of facets variable known as brackets. The approach can determine the homogeneous coordinates of the given system and the entries of the Bèzout block. Conditions for determining the homogeneous coordinates are also given and proven.
Bi2Se3 is one of the promising materials in thermoelectric devices and is environmentally friendly due to its efficiency to perform in room temperature. Structural and electronic properties of Bi2Se3 were investigated based on the first-principles calculation of density functional theory (DFT) using CASTEP computer code. The calculation is conducted within the exchange-correlation of local density approximation (LDA) and generalised gradient approximation within the revision of Perdew-Burke-Ernzerhof (GGA-PBE) functional. A comparative study is carried out between the electronic properties of LDA and GGA-PBE. Lattice parameter and band gap are consistent with the other reports. Calculation from LDA is more accurate and has a better agreement than GGA-PBE in describing the lattice parameter of Bi2Se3. Band gap and density of states of LDA show higher electrical conductivity than GGA-PBE. Both LDA and GGA-PBE have same degree of thermal conductivity due to the occurrence of indirect band gap at same range of wave vector.
Natural fibre is known useful in many applications however, the existing fibre treatment method able to reduce its overall properties. In this study, a new, simple and cost-effective fibre coating treatment method was developed which was able to improve the physical and morphological properties that open a new path for natural based materials to be used in a more robust application. The physical and morphological properties of various coated kenaf fibres were analysed to comprehend the cutting behaviour of coated fibres after subjected to the pulverisation process. The kenaf fibres were individually immersed in 1:4, 1:5 and 1:6 epoxy to acetone coating solutions prior cured, and pulverised consecutively using 5 mm, 1 mm, 0.5 mm and 0.25 mm mesh sizes aperture. The morphological characteristic was analysed using polarised optical and scanning electron microscope. The result showed that 1:6 coating ratio solution able to effectively coat the fibres’ aspect ratio that forming individual coated fibre which in long length pulverised fibres. Moreover, the low viscous 1:6 solution able to penetrate inside fibre structure that supported by density and fibre crosssection analysis compare to the other solutions. In future, this analysis is crucial to give insight on the coated fibres behaviour after subjected to the mechanical means of cutting process that later relates to the reinforcing mechanism in the composite samples.
This study was conducted to evaluate the effect of pre-treatment on the fishy flavour and odour removal of gelatine extracted from the skin of sutchi catfish (Pangasius sutchi). Pre-treatment of the skin involved soaking at 4°C in distilled water (GC), lime followed by tamarind (GLT) or salt followed by activated carbon (GSC) prior to extraction in warm distilled water (50°C) for 12 hours. Yield, physical properties and sensory were determined. Results showed that GLT produced highest yield (19.72%) compared to GSC (15.01%) and GC (15.81%). Although, GLT exhibited lowest gel strength (282.29g), viscoelasticity (14.1ºC) and setting point (10.46ºC) compared to other pre-treatments, fishy flavour and odour of the gelatine were almost absent with the score of 1.68 and 1.74, respectively. These values were below those of reference which are 1.87 (fishy flavour) and 2.71 (fishy odour) denoting from ‘absent to weak’. Since fishy flavour and odour were almost absent, soaking sutchi catfish skin in lime followed by tamarind could be a good method for achieving the desired sensory attributes of the freshwater fish by the reduction of the gelatine off flavour.