This study was conducted using crab shells as a biosorbent to remove Cu and Cd with different initial concentrations of 1, 5, 10, 15, and 20 mg/L in a biosorption treatment process. Crab shells were selected as biosorbents due to their abundance in the environment and ready availability as waste products from the market place. This study aimed to determine the ability of Scylla Serrata shells to remove Cu and Cd in an aqueous solution, as well as to provide a comparison of the removal rate between the two metals. The data were incorporated into hydrochemical software, PHREEQC, to investigate the chemical speciation distribution of each heavy metal. The shells of S. serrata were found to have a significant (p< 0.05) ability to remove Cu and Cd following the treatment. After six hours of treatment, the crab shells had removed 60 to 80% of both metals. However, the highest removal percentage was achieved for Cu with up to 94.7% removal rate in 5 mg/L initial Cu concentration, while 85.1% of Cd was removed in 1 mg/L initial solution, respectively. It can be concluded that the shells of S. serrata could remove Cu and Cd better with significant results (p
The purpose of this research is to enhance the gain signal amplification by using dual
pump double pass configuration in comparative with single pump double pass that are
commonly used as conventional optical amplifier configuration in optical
communication system nowadays. Two input signals power have been implemented
which are -30 and 0 decibel (dB). The input signal defined as low and high input signals
power by using a pump power of 1480 nm. The amplification of EDFA in this study have
been taken place in conventional band (C) band and long wavelength band (L) band of
EDFA within the range of 1515 to 1615 nm. Therefore, to understand the performance
of the gain amplification, the OptiSystem software simulator version 13 has been used
for simulation and the values of fiber length and pump power has been varied for both
configurations. It has been found that the, dual pump double pass configuration has
shown better gain performance at lower input signal power compared to the single
pump double pass configuration.
Computer vision is applied in many software and devices. The detection and
reconstruction of the human skeletal structure is one of area of interest, where the
camera will identify the human parts and construct the joints of the person standing in
front. Three-dimensional pose estimation is solved using various learning approaches,
such as Support Vector Machines and Gaussian processes. However, difficulties in
cluttered scenarios are encountered, and require additional input data, such as
silhouettes, or controlled camera settings. The paper focused on estimating the threedimensional
pose of a person without requiring background information, which is
robust to camera variations. Each of the joint has three-dimensional space position and
matrix orientation with respect to the sensor. Matlab Simulink was utilized to provide
communication tools with depth camera using Kinect device for skeletal detection.
Results on the skeletal detection using Kinect sensor is analysed in measuring the
abilities to detect skeletal structure accurately, and it is shown that the system is able
to detect human skeletal performing non-complex basic motions in daily life.
This paper presents a modified design of low power recovery circuit in micro-system implanted device to stimulate the human nerve and muscle. The amplitude shift keying ASK was used to modulate data by using operating frequency 6.78MHz ISM industrial scientific medical band to be less invasive to tissue. The proposed system consists of an external part which has ASK modulator and class-E power amplifier with 94.5% efficiency. The internal part has half wave rectifier and voltage regulator to generate very stable 1.8VDC using 0.35um CMOS technology. The Orcad pspice 16.6 and MULTISIM 11 software were used to simulate the design of power recovery and class-E power amplifier respectively. The regulated voltage utilised to power the sub-electronic device implanted inside human body with very stable voltage even change implanted load resistance. The proposed system has 12.5%modulation index and low power consumption.
Prolonged drought conditions have adverse environmental and socio-economic impacts due to unmet water demands. Defining drought is difficult because of its onset and ending time. Therefore, characterisation of drought is essential for drought management operations. Thus, drought indices come in handy and are a practical approach to assimilate large amounts of data into quantitative information which can then be applied for drought forecasting, declaring drought levels, contingency planning and impact assessments. This study analyses drought events using indices, namely SPI and Deciles Index, computed with DrinC software program but are not popular in Malaysia. It is observed that both indices are identical and suitable for drought occurrences.
In this paper, cap and pin porcelain insulator was studied under an environment with different levels
of humidity. The electric field strength and voltage distribution profile along the insulator string was
simulated using a computational software package. In this study, ANSYS Maxwell based on the Finite
Element Method (FEM) was used to simulate the short standard insulator string. The short standard
insulator string was modelled as a five-unit cap and pin porcelain insulator that was stacked according
to the IEC 60383 standard. Different humidity levels measured using relative humidity is applied to
the insulator. From this simulation, the locations within the insulator under high electric field stress are
identified when different humidity is applied.
In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in quadcopter technology
implementation in the real world; for instance in real estate photography, aerial surveying, periodic
forest monitoring, and search/rescue missions. Generally, each quadcopter implementation required
different sensors which are needed to attach and integrate into quadcopter system. However, the most
critical part in almost cases is preparing the quadcopter flight performance and capability to be suited
in any outdoor applications. Because of that reason, this paper has proposed an implementation of
Open-Source Project (OSPs) platform as autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) quadcopter
development that can be fitted for any outdoor applications or even in research experimental purposes.
We started out with an explanation about the general approach that has been used in the development
of a quadcopter testbed, and then followed with detail explanations in the OSP platform approach.
The OSP platform is the most popular approach. The main reason is because of their flexibility in both
hardware and software. The basic quadcopter configuration for autonomous flight also presented and
applied. This paper also provided several outdoor experiments results in uncontrolled environment
that have been executed using our developed testbed to evaluate their performance, such as attitude
and altitude stabilization, interference and vibration effect, and trajectory mapping generation.
Finally, throughout this project, we realized that the OPSs quadcopter platform has offered almost
complete frameworks in the development of quadcopter for any outdoor applications or even as a
research testbed system.
The paper presents the data from the surface and subsurface mapping of this area for the purpose of siting industrial city in the area. The field data collected combine with the borehole data was to successfully apply these to solving geological, environmental and engineering complications posed by the complexity of the subsurface geological structures underlain this area. The Electrical Resistivity, (ER) and Induced Polarization, (IP) data were initially processed using RES2DINV software model to generate the depth to the lithological units together with topographic correction. The 2-D ER and IP data were collected from 23rd April 2017 up until 7th May 2017 covering a total of about 17.6 km along 44 survey lines using ABEM Terrameter SAS4000 for the field measurement. A total of 20 Borehole logs data were recorded to better characterized in-situ, the subsurface geological formations emplaced in the study area. The study area is located at Bagan Datuk, Perak Darul Ridzuan situated on Latitude 2° 44.653'N and Longitudes 104° 28.79' E along the west coast Peninsula Malaysia. The topography of the area is generally flat low-laying and elevation range from about 0 m to 32 m above mean sea level (MSL).
This study evaluates the ImageJ software as dosimetric tools for analyzing the film dosimeter in high energy photons and electrons. The percentage depth dose of photons of 6 and 10 MV and electrons of 6 and 9 MeV were measured using the Gafchromic EBT2 film dosimeter. The films were scanned and analyzed using the Verisoft software and ImageJ. The beam profiles at nominal photon and electron beam parameters were also evaluated using the two methods. The PDD measured in ImageJ at high energy photons were in good agreement within 1% percentage of discrepancy at all depths in comparison to the Verisoft software. The PDD measured in ImageJ at high energy electrons also showed good agreement to Verisoft software within 8% percentage of discrepancy at all depths. The measured flatness of beam profiles at Dmax, R50, R80 and R90 in ImageJ were also in good agreement to Verisoft software with flatness value between 4 and 8%. The results indicated the suitability of ImageJ software as dosimetric tool for analyzing EBT2 film dosimeter at high energy photon and electrons.
Exact pattern matching algorithms are popular and used widely in several applications, such as molecular biology, text processing, image processing, web search engines, network intrusion detection systems and operating systems. The focus of these algorithms is to achieve time efficiency according to applications but not memory consumption. In this work, we propose a novel idea to achieve both time efficiency and memory consumption by splitting query string for searching in Corpus. For a given text, the proposed algorithm split the query pattern into two equal halves and considers the second (right) half as a query string for searching in Corpus. Once the match is found with second halves, the proposed algorithm applies brute force procedure to find remaining match by referring the location of right half. Experimental results on different S1 Dataset, namely Arabic, English, Chinese, Italian and French text databases show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the existing S1 Algorithm in terms of time efficiency and memory consumption as the length of the query pattern increases.
Flexible manufacturing system (FMS) enhances the firm's flexibility and responsiveness to the ever-changing customer demand by providing a fast product diversification capability. Performance of an FMS is highly dependent upon the accuracy of scheduling policy for the components of the system, such as automated guided vehicles (AGVs). An AGV as a mobile robot provides remarkable industrial capabilities for material and goods transportation within a manufacturing facility or a warehouse. Allocating AGVs to tasks, while considering the cost and time of operations, defines the AGV scheduling process. Multi-objective scheduling of AGVs, unlike single objective practices, is a complex and combinatorial process. In the main draw of the research, a mathematical model was developed and integrated with evolutionary algorithms (genetic algorithm (GA), particle swarm optimization (PSO), and hybrid GA-PSO) to optimize the task scheduling of AGVs with the objectives of minimizing makespan and number of AGVs while considering the AGVs' battery charge. Assessment of the numerical examples' scheduling before and after the optimization proved the applicability of all the three algorithms in decreasing the makespan and AGV numbers. The hybrid GA-PSO produced the optimum result and outperformed the other two algorithms, in which the mean of AGVs operation efficiency was found to be 69.4, 74, and 79.8 percent in PSO, GA, and hybrid GA-PSO, respectively. Evaluation and validation of the model was performed by simulation via Flexsim software.
The steady two dimensional magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) boundary layer flow and heat transfer over a stretching/shrinking permeable wedge is numerically investigated. The partial differential equations governing the flow and heat transfer are transformed into a system of ordinary differential equations using a similarity transformation. These equations are then solved numerically using the boundary value problem solver, bvp4c in Matlab software. It is found that dual solutions exist for a certain range of the shrinking strength. A stability analysis is performed to identify which solution is stable and physically reliable.
The main objective of this research is to compare the seating pressure during the driving session between two
different types of national cars. The objective of this research is to conduct object pressure distribution study on
two different types of car seat using CONFORMat (model 5330) with system model CER2, compare and analyse the
results based on object pressure between both car seat. Twelve respondents participated a driving session with
TekscanCONFORMat (model 5330) setup using the same route for both national car. We select two types of national
cars equipped with automatic transmission for this research. The seat pressure on the subject along the journey is
recorded using TekscanCONFORMat Research 7.60 software. Later, comparison made with respect to the seat
pressure experiencedby twelve respondents. The results shows different values of backand seat pressure recorded
among the twelve subjects. Lastly, the results are analysedand discussed at the end of this paper. Model B seat
design has better ability to distribute evenly the pressure to both seat and back. However, results for Model A
showed the pressure is more concentrated on the seat area.
In this paper, a dual-band metamaterial absorber (MMA) ring with a mirror reflexed C-shape is introduced for X and Ku band sensing applications. The proposed metamaterial consists of two square ring resonators and a mirror reflexed C-shape, which reveals two distinctive absorption bands in the electromagnetic wave spectrum. The mechanism of the two-band absorber particularly demonstrates two resonance frequencies and absorption was analyzed using a quasi-TEM field distribution. The absorption can be tunable by changing the size of the metallic ring in the frequency spectrum. Design and analysis of the proposed meta-absorber was performed using the finite-integration technique (FIT)-based CST microwave studio simulation software. Two specific absorption peaks value of 99.6% and 99.14% are achieved at 13.78 GHz and 15.3 GHz, respectively. The absorption results have been measured and compared with computational results. The proposed dual-band absorber has potential applications in sensing techniques for satellite communication and radar systems.
MapReduce is the preferred cloud computing framework used in large data analysis and application processing. MapReduce frameworks currently in place suffer performance degradation due to the adoption of sequential processing approaches with little modification and thus exhibit underutilization of cloud resources. To overcome this drawback and reduce costs, we introduce a Parallel MapReduce (PMR) framework in this paper. We design a novel parallel execution strategy of Map and Reduce worker nodes. Our strategy enables further performance improvement and efficient utilization of cloud resources execution of Map and Reduce functions to utilize multicore environments available with computing nodes. We explain in detail makespan modeling and working principle of the PMR framework in the paper. Performance of PMR is compared with Hadoop through experiments considering three biomedical applications. Experiments conducted for BLAST, CAP3, and DeepBind biomedical applications report makespan time reduction of 38.92%, 18.00%, and 34.62% considering the PMR framework against Hadoop framework. Experiments' results prove that the PMR cloud computing platform proposed is robust, cost-effective, and scalable, which sufficiently supports diverse applications on public and private cloud platforms. Consequently, overall presentation and results indicate that there is good matching between theoretical makespan modeling presented and experimental values investigated.
Management is consistently facing fast-flowing and lots of changes in business, including in the inventory management. Especially for fast-moving inventories, the correct stocking, controlling, checking and safety stock calculation is highly needed to have an exquisite inventory management and to reduce the possibility of running out of inventory which leads to unavailability to meet the demand. One of the ways to overcome this is by doing an excellent and appropriate forecasting. Therefore, the objective of this concept paper is to analyse and recommend tools to improve inventory management using the appropriate time-series forecasting method. The firm studied in this study is serving its employees as customers that demand the routine items including stationeries and other routine products to support their job as auditors and consultants for its client. However, there are occasions when there is out-of-stock situation for fast-moving items, especially in the peak season period. Furthermore, the firm is only applying replenishment based on the used inventories from the previous month. Therefore, this study suggests to eliminate out-of-stock items situation by applying precaution initiatives such as time-series forecasting. This study is planned to employ 10 time-series forecasting methods such as moving average, exponential smoothing, regression analysis, Holt-Winters analysis, Seasonal analysis and Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) using Risk Simulator Software. By simulating those methods, the most appropriate method is selected based on the forecasting accuracy measurement.
This paper demonstrates the performance of a potential design of a paper substrate-based flexible antenna for intrabody telemedicine systems in the 2.4 GHz industrial, scientific, and medical radio (ISM) bands. The antenna was fabricated using 0.54 mm thick flexible photo paper and 0.03 mm copper strips as radiating elements. Design and performance analyses of the antenna were performed using Computer Simulation Technology (CST) Microwave Studio software. The antenna performances were investigated based on the reflection coefficient in normal and bent conditions. The total dimensions of the proposed antenna are 40 × 35 × 0.6 mm³. The antenna operates at 2.33⁻2.53 GHz in the normal condition. More than an 8% fractional bandwidth is expressed by the antenna. Computational analysis was performed at different flexible curvatures by bending the antenna. The minimum fractional bandwidth deviation is 5.04% and the maximum is 24.97%. Moreover, it was mounted on a homogeneous phantom muscle and a four-layer human tissue phantom. Up to a 70% radiation efficiency with a 2 dB gain was achieved by the antenna. Finally, the performance of the antenna with a homogeneous phantom muscle was measured and found reliable for wearable telemedicine applications.
Rattans are one of the most unique and economically important plants for most tropical countries. There is however, a lack of interest in the specific study of the rattan spines. In this paper, we tested a new hypothesis concerning the functional role of rattan spines. We proposed that rattan spines also serve as a visual deterrent against herbivores or seed predators. In our proposed method we used an Imaging software, ImageJ, to measure the spine area of four species of rattan (Calamus insignis, Myrialepis schortechinii, Plectocomiopsis geminiflorus and Calamus caesius) from two different orientations (root to shoot and vice versa). Our results showed that rattan spines were very heterogeneous and highly variable between different species. One common trait that the rattan spines share is that spine area measurements of shoot to root (ShR) are larger than root to shoot (RH) orientation. We propose that the downwards spine angle might be specifically designed to discourage climbing leaf and seed predators.
Introduction: The purpose of this study was to decide on the relation between types of mixing and the porosity of diameter (1-100) µm and compressive strength of RMGIC. Methods: Fifteen specimens 6mm height and 4mm in diameter were prepared for each type of luting cement and were stored in distilled water at 37° C for 24 hours. The compressive strength was determined. The fractured surfaces of 10 randomly selected specimens of each cement type were analyzed using SEM at 250 times magnification, and five photomicrographs were taken at five random places. All the photomicrographs were analyzed using image analyzer software to determine the amount and size of porosity present. Results: There was no significant difference in compressive strength between different mixing methods, but it had a significant impact by increasing the percentage of porosity of diameter (1-100) µm in diameter of RMGIC. There was no linear relationship between compressive strength and porosity (1-100) µm in diameter for both types of luting cements (P>0.05). Conclusion: No significant differences in compressive strength were found using different mixing methods. The size and number of porosity in the specimens of encapsulated cements were greater than those of hand-mixed cements. The porosity (1-100) µm in diameter and the compressive strength bore no linear relationship to each other.
A study was conducted to examine the usage of application software and its development practices in Malaysia. The study has shown that the use of application software is greatly emphasized by organizations in their respective businesses. And for most organizations, the application software is supplied by a vendor or through in house development. For the software development practices, the deployment of a current technique and technology is still inadequate. Therefore, most of the existing information technology practitioners should be given additional training on the latest techniques of software development. Other aspect of improvement on software development practices is also discussed.
Satu kajian terhadap status pemakaian dan kegiatan pembangunan perisian gunaan di Malaysia telah dijalankan. Kajian ini menunjukkan yang aspek pemakaian sangat diberi penekanan oleh organisasi. Manakala proses perolehan perisian gunaan pula terbahagi secara setara di antara buat sendiri dengan menggunakan pihak ketiga. Namun begitu yang ketara ialah kadar penggunaan teknologi dan teknik terkini dalam kegiatan pembangunan perisian masih berkurangan. Oleh itu disarankan supaya aspek latihan teknik kakitangan teknologi maklumat organisasi perlu dipertingkatkan secara berterusan. Di samping itu kajian ini memaparkan beberapa aspek amalan pembangunan perisian yang boleh diperbaiki lagi.