Development of e-abacus

Abd Kadir Mahamad, Mohamad Solehin Robian and Sharifah Saon

Nowadays, most people prefer to use calculator as it is the easiest machine to perform their calculation. However, using calculator would not illustrate how the calculation was performed. On the other hand, abacus illustrates the steps to perform mathematic operations, although it takes time to learn. To decrease the time spending in learning the abacus, electronic abacus or E-abacus is introduced. The main objective of this project is to make E-abacus easy to learn and use. The idea of the proposed device is to combine the traditional abacus with the calculator. E-abacus can perform two tasks; displaying number according to the beads and four basic mathematical operations which are addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. The hardware used in development of E-abacus are Japanese abacus (Soroban), Arduino Mega microcontroller, and Infra-red (IR) sensor. Open Source Arduino software (IDE) is used to program the microprocessor using C language. From observations, E-abacus evidently can operate successfully to perform mathematical operations.

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Implementation of bluetooth communication in developing a mobile measuring device to measure human finger movement

Alvin Jacob, Wan Nurshazwani Wan Zakaria and Mohd Razali Bin Md Tomari

This paper focuses on evaluating and testing the usage of Bluetooth communication in a mobile measuring device to evaluate the flexion and extension of an athlete’s hand. This mobile measuring device is targeted for athlete that plays racket based sports, like Badminton which is a game that needs fast actions. For this sole reason human eyes are not enough to analyse the fast movement and additional equipment is needed. This is where a solution is proposed, usage of a mobile measuring device that can capture the activities from the player’s hand. To maintain the mobility of the measuring device, wireless connection to a personal computer is used. The Bluetooth communication technology is used to send the data obtained from the player to a personal computer for further processing. The data will be later analysed by the coach or the player themselves to evaluate information on their performance. To evaluate the stability and feasibility of the develop communication protocol; experiments were conducted to measure the flexion of the player’s hand and send it through Bluetooth communication to a base station. The experiments result exhibits the capabilities of the Bluetooth communication in providing a wireless serial link between the transmitter and receiver for data transmission.

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A review data cube analysis method in big data environment

Dewi Puspa Suhana Ghazali, Rohaya Latip, Masnida Hussin and Mohd Helmy Abd Wahab

With the development of computer technologies, the amount of data has explosive growth and the data volumes have approximately doubled each year. One of the tools that affect scalability and flexibility to handle structured as well as unstructured data called Hadoop. However, data cubes are widely used as a powerful tool to provide multi-dimensional views in data warehousing and On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP). Therefore, it is becoming expensive to perform the data cube analysis when the data sizes increases. In this paper, we will investigate and review the methods of MapReduce in Hadoop.

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Feature extraction of EEG signal using wavelet transform for autism classification

Lung Chuin Cheong, Rubita Sudirman and Siti Suraya Hussin

Feature extraction is a process to extract information from the electroencephalogram (EEG) signal to represent the large dataset before performing classification. This paper is intended to study the use of discrete wavelet transform (DWT) in extracting feature from EEG signal obtained by sensory response from autism children. In this study, DWT is used to decompose a filtered EEG signal into its frequency components and the statistical feature of the DWT coefficient are computed in time domain. The features are used to train a multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network to classify the signals into three classes of autism severity (mild, moderate and severe). The training results in classification accuracy achieved up to 92.3% with MSE of 0.0362. Testing on the trained neural network shows that all samples used for testing is being classified correctly.

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Simulation based study of electric vehicle parameters

T.A.T. Mohd, M.K. Hassan, Ishak Aris, A. Che Soh, B.S.K.K. Ibrahim and M.K. Hat

As electric vehicle becomes a favorable alternative for sustainable and cleaner energy emission in transportation, modeling and simulation of electric vehicle has attracts increasing attentions to the researchers. Selecting appropriate parameters of electric vehicle and understanding their characteristics, are the preliminary step in modeling a good electric vehicle. This paper presents the study of vehicle parameters based on simulation of electric vehicle. Three different car segments are proposed for the simulation of three driving cycles. The simulations result demonstrates the significance of each segment parameters to the performance and fuel economy of electric vehicle. All works are performed in MATLAB/Simulink environment.

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Improvement of the sag ampacity carrying level of existing 275 KV overhead line tower by using the re-conductoring approach

Luqman Hakim Mahmod, Md Nor Ramdon Baharom, Zainab Zainal, Irshad Ullah and Irfan Ali

Urban cities grown in population day by day, proportionally to the electricity demand. The existence of the right of ways and the decreasing of land space to build new overhead transmission line towers, other criterion had to be observed. Other than upgrading towers, re-conductoring can be pursued if it does not violates the right of ways in any aspect. This project compares available conductors in the market to determine which will provide better performance in terms of current and sag for 275 kV lattice tower.

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Magnetic particle imaging system for cancer diagnosis: an overview

A. A. Sadiq, N. B. Othman and M. M. Abdul Jamil

Medical diagnosis over the last decades have been reformed by tomographic imaging and has become a vital tool for diagnosis of several diseases. Magnetic particle imaging (MPI) as a new quantitative imaging method, uses the nonlinear re-magnetization behavior of magnetic nanoparticles to determine their local concentration. This paper presents an overview of a proposed method to design and construct an MPI scanner that will diagnose cancer. It is expected at the end of the research to come up with an extremely sensitive scanner that will detect the position of magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) used as tracers in diagnosing cancer by producing a high temporal and spatial resolution images.

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Cyclic voltammetry measurement for n-type cu₂o thin film using copper acetate-based solution

Asyikin Sasha binti Mohd Hanif, Fariza binti Mohamad and Razmi Zafiruddin bin Zakaria

Cyclic voltammetry (CV) measurement are used to determine the ideal potential range to deposit n-type cuprous oxide by electrodeposition method on fluorine-doped tin oxide (FTO) glass substrate using copper (II) acetate-based solution. Conventional methods of fabrication were time and cost consuming due to no ideal parameter setup. With cyclic voltammetry measurement, redox reaction could not be obtained. Hence, the parameters for fabrication process were optimized. Electrodeposition method was used to deposit the cuprous oxide thin film onto the FTO glass substrate. The selected pH values for this study were pH 5.5 and 6.5 with deposition temperature of 50 and 60 °C. The deposition time was fixed to 60 minutes. N-Cu₂O thin films were fabricated and then characterized using Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscopy, X-Ray Diffractometer, Ultraviolet-Visible Spectroscopy and surface profiler. From the results of the analyses, the band gap obtained was 1.8 eV. The structural, morphological and optical properties showed that cuprous oxide with (111) preferred orientation were successfully fabricated.

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Pilot study on development of GPR system using hyperlog antenna

Ariffuddin Joret, Samsul Haimi Dahlan, M. F. L. Abdullah and Aziman Madun

GPR is known as one of a non-destructive testing (NDT) method capable of detecting objects underground. Antenna is an important part in this system as the function is to produce and detect electromagnetic wave. As one of the alternatives, Hyperlog antenna which has high bandwidth can be used in the development of GPR system. In this paper, the GPR system has been developed using Hyperlog antenna and network analyser. Based on the results, the developed GPR system is capable of detecting a circular iron plat buried in sand around 0.06 metre depth. This shows that the Hyperlog antenna is suitable for use in GPR system.

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Optimal torque investigation of outer-rotor hybrid excitation flux switching machine for in-wheel drive EV

M. Z. Ahmad, E. Sulaiman, G. M. Romalan and Z.A. Haron

This paper presents an optimal torque investigation of outer-rotor hybrid excitation flux switching machine (OR-HEFSM) for in-wheel drive electric vehicle (EV). Previously, most of the successful electric machines for electric drive in EV/HEV is interior permanent magnet synchronous motor (IPMSM) due to their ability to deliver high torque and power densities for great starting and climbing conditions. Nevertheless, the IPMSM has some demerit owing to high volume of permanent magnet (PM) used and unrobustness rotor. As an alternative candidates, flux switching machine (FSM) having robust rotor structure and higher torque capability has been proposed for EV/HEV drive and many research has been reported over the last decade. However, most of them are mainly focused on inner-rotor configuration. Therefore, in this paper the proposed OR-HEFSM is investigated to have maximum performances similar to IPMSM conventionally employed in existing HEV. Several defined parameters of OR-HEFSM are treated using determistic optmization method to attempt maximum torque performance. After several cycles of optimization investigation, the proposed machine has achieved the target maximum average torque and power of 335.08Nm and 160.2kW, respectively.

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Nowadays security has become an essential part in life especially home security. This is because the crime rate involving intrusion, burglary and robbery has increased drastically day and night especially in the residential areas. Thus, this project was introduced to increase the safely level by designing a cheap and affordable system which consist of a motion sensor, Arduino Yun; the communication between user and the system. This design also involves a webcam for remote viewing and speaker for the alert sound. An alarm will be triggered when motion detects a movement in the area. The webcam will then capture the picture and send it to the user via email. The email is then sent using the Simple Mail Text Protocol (SMTP). The prototype was developed and tested.

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Brushless DC motors are the most widely used electrical drive in the industry. The development process of the drive is costly and time-consuming. However, various methods can be used to reduce the development time of the drive. This paper presents the Model-Based Design technique of Brushless DC Motor using MATLAB/Simulink with Arduino support block set. The model of BLDC motor is developed using black-box modeling approach; simulations are performed based on real-time data and processed using MATLAB System Identification tool box. The PID Controller is then designed and tuned within the simulations to attain the drive performance. For real-time application, the controller code is generated and uploaded into Arduino Mega embedded controller. The results obtained from simulation and experiment is discussed and compared. The performed works concludes that Model-based design technique can be applied in any control design application using low cost controller such as Arduino embedded controller.

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Comparison between single-phase and three-phase fefsm with non-overlap windings and salient rotor

Mohd Fairoz Omar, Erwan Sulaiman, Faisal Khan, Gadafi M Romalan and Zhafir Aizat Husin

This paper presents a comparison between single-phase 12S-6P and three-phase 12S-10P field excitation flux switching machine (FEFSM) with non-overlap windings and salient rotor. Based on the previous designs, three-phase FEFSM and single-phase FEFSM have been developed with the overlap windings between armature and FEC which create problems of high end coil, increase the size of the motor and high copper losses. Moreover, the previous designs has odd number of pole caused unbalance magnetic forces. Therefore, a single-phase 12S-6P FEFSM and three-phase 12S-10P FEFSM with non-overlap windings and salient rotor is introduced to reduce the coil end problem. In this study, the operating principle of single-phase and three-phase salient rotor is also investigated. Then, flux line, flux distribution, induced voltage, torque and power versus speed validated with 2D-finite element analysis. Finally, the comparison of torque and power versus speed between two designs is highlighted. As a conclusion, three-phase 12S-10P FEFSM design is much better because at the based speed of 3597r/min, torque obtained is 13.5Nm, while the maximum power achieved is 3.2kW.

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Low order harmonics improvement of a single grid connected inverter system under pr control technique

S. Salimin, A. A Bakar and M. Armstrong

Distributed generation technologies or embedded generation is rapidly becoming a significant and important matter worldwide. It is important that the current harmonics current produced at the output of the inverter do not exceed the standards. In this paper, simulation of grid connected inverter system with PI and PR current controller are done and the results show improvements in the low order harmonics spectrum when using the PR control technique in the inverter system.

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Performance of star patch antenna on a paper substrate material

Wan Noor Najwa Wan Marzudi, Zuhairiah Zainal Abidin, Samsul Haimi Dahlan, Khairun Nidzam Ramli and Muhammad Ramlee Kamarudin

This paper presents the performance of the antenna on a paper substrate material. The antenna consists of star patch and two L-stub added on the star patch to achieve lower band frequency. It has been shown that the sustainable paper substrate has a widest impedance bandwidth of 84% from 2.45 GHz to 6 GHz. Moreover, the antenna performance comparison in terms of impedance bandwidth and antenna gain using different substrates has been discussed. The antenna performances characteristics are given in terms of reflection coefficient, impedance bandwidth, antenna gain, surface current distribution, Voltage Standing Wave Ratio (VSWR) and radiation pattern. In addition, a parametric study is conducted to facilitate the design and optimization process.

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Cost analysis study through optimization of a sludge drying plant for a petroleum refinery

M. Zurix Mohamed, M. Feizal M. Ghazali , Sevia. M. Idrus, Norhaliza. A. Wahab and Zulkarnain Mokhtar

A Sludge Drying Plant (SDP) produces bio-sludge cakes as end products. In most cases, it is the final processing facility of Effluent Treatment System (ETS) before it is sent out for final disposal, either through landfill or handing it over to a third party body with some economic impacts. Efficiency of the SDP determines the economic impact should this bio-sludge is handed over to a third party body for disposal. The resultant of the dry solid produced from the SDP can also tremendously affect the overall process costs. In an ideal state, the dry solid produces contain 0% water content; however, in an actual plant 0% water content can never be achieved. On disposal, Kualiti Alam, a body appointed for disposal purposes, will charge the dried cake sludge based on the weight, regardless water or dry solids. Therefore it is only sensible to export the dried cake at maximum dryness. Suitable sludge management which includes preventive maintenance and operating costs can reduce the overall process costs. This paper focuses on how cost and sludge management correlates and improvement is practically seen on an actual implementation of this optimization. Factors that contributes to the overall SDP performance for parameter optimization for the SDP is identified through actual process data a capture from a life SDP plant and analysis as well as identification of the subsystems within the SDP itself.

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Rehabilitation system for paraplegic patients using mind-machine interface; a conceptual framework

F. Sherwani, B.S.K.K. Ibrahim, M. Saiful Huq, M.K.I. Ahmad, N.H.M. Nasir and K.A.A. Rahman

Mind-Machine Interface (MMI) is a newly surfaced term in the field of control engineering and rehabilitation systems. This technique, coupled with the existing functional electrical stimulation (FES) systems, can be very beneficial for effective rehabilitation of disabled patients. This paper presents a conceptual framework for the development of MMI based FES systems for therapeutic aid and function restoration in spinal cord injured (SCI) paraplegic patients. It is intended to acquire thought modulated signals from human brain and then use these signals to command and control FES as desired by the patient. The proposed setup can significantly assist the rehabilitation and recovery of paraplegic patients due to the ease of control for the user.

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Performance evaluation of different logical topologies and their respective protocols for wireless sensor networks

N. A. M. Alduais, L.Audah, A. Jamil and J. Abdullah

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have several constraints of the sensor nodes such as limited energy source, low memory size and low processing speed, which are the principal obstacles to design efficient protocols for WSNs. Major challenges of WSNs are to prolong  the network lifetime and throughput. This paper explores performance of WSNs in different logical topologies. Logical topologies play very significant role in the overall performances of the network, such as network lifetime, throughput, , energy consumption and end-to-end delay. A number of logical topologies was proposed for WSNs, including flat topology, cluster-distributed topology, cluster-centralized topology and chain topology, along with their corresponding routing protocols. In addition, the outcome of the study has a significant role on those parameters of concerned. Simulation experiments were done by using NS-2.34 program for the logical topologies. The topologies were cluster–distributed, chain-based, cluster-centralized and flat with its corresponding protocols of LEACH, PEGASIS, LEACH-C and MTE respectively. MATLAB is used to plot the graphs. Performance metrics measured are the network lifetime, energy consumption and total amount of aggregate data received at the base station.

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Comparative study of edge detection algorithm: vessel wall elasticity measurement for deep vein thrombosis diagnosis

Noor Hafizzatul ‘Izzah bt Mat Harun, Nabilah bt Ibrahim and Nur Shazilah bt Aziz

In this paper, a comparative study of different edge detection methods had been done to determine the vessel wall elasticity for early diagnosis of the Deep Vein Thrombosis condition. Currently, in most research found that the measurement of the vessel detection conducted solely on the raw image obtains from the ultrasound. Thus, the precision of the measurement could be controvertible from time to time. As a matter of fact, the image consists of its individual characteristics or properties that cannot be verified distinctly. Therefore, various methods of edge detection techniques had been applied to the B-mode ultrasound image. There are several edge detection techniques available for pre-processing in computer vision. Though, Canny, Sobel and Roberts are some of the most applied methods. This paper compares each of the methods by the evaluation of the Mean Squared Error (MSE) and Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) of the output image. The evaluations are using Matlab software, the algorithms applied on the B-mode image of 10 subjects that had been volunteering for the purpose of the study. Both the MSE and the PSNR were in
numeric values, that includes the vessel wall elasticity measurement of the popliteal vein, therefore, the performance of the algorithm is determined.

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A potential study of piezoelectric energy harvesting in car vibration

Syahrul Hisham Mohamad, Mohd Firdaus Thalas, Aminurrashid Noordin, Muhammad Sharil Yahya, Mohd Hanif Che Hassan and Zulkifli Ibrahim

Micro Generating System Using Piezoelectric for Low Energy System is a system that provides the user with free flowing energy that can be used without any consequences to the environment. This system enables users to generate low energy for their uses by transforming the mechanical energy produced by the car engine vibration into electrical energy. This project is generally about designing and developing the circuit and its charging system for piezoelectricity. The electrical energy harvested is then charged the capacitor after passing through full wave rectifier. The harvesting system is made up of piezoelectric cantilever that will convert vibration to electrical energy and the charging system is made up of capacitor and known as capacitor banks. The system is then installed at a car engine to generate energy from the car vibration when the engine is switched on. The energy is then being directly used or stored in the capacitor bank for future uses.

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Indian electricity market volume and price cross-correlation analysis

Mayukha Pal, P. Madhusudana Rao and P. Manimaran

We apply the multifractal detrended cross-correlation analysis method to investigate the cross-correlation and fractal behavior between the price and volume of the electricity market. For this purpose, we have collected the data from the Indian electricity energy exchange from 1^st April 2012 to 1^st April 2015 with time interval of 1 hour. From the analysis, we observe a cross over near the scale (~ 32) in the fluctuation function, and thus we have calculated the Hurst scaling exponents for the scale <= 32 (short term) and > 32 (long term). The cross-correlation is observed persistent in short term and anti-persistent in long term. The multifractal nature is present in both short and long term and the strength of the multifractality was measured from the calculated singularity spectrum.

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Defected ground structure for beam steering array antenna applications

K. S. Ahmad, S. A. Hamzah  F and F.C. Seman

Incorporation of Defected Ground Structure (DGS) into the Microstrip Phased Array Antenna (PAA) provides desirable changes to the direction of the main beam. In this paper, investigation on the development of 2 x 1 rectangular patches which operates at 9 GHz is presented. The two rectangular patches are separated at 0.258l and the microstrip line is feeding to the center of the patches to provide impedance matching. Then, an orthogonal-I-shaped DGS is inserted in between the two patches at the ground plane. It is found that by changing the dimension of the DGS, the main lobe of the PAA increases from 39° to 137°, however, the directivity of the arrays maintains about 6 dBi. This demonstrates the potential of employing DGS to steer the main beam of PAA instead of using additional phase shifter which is bulky and more complicated to connect to the antenna’s feeding line.

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10gb/s nrz based on self-phase modulation in all optical 2r regeneration

We demonstrated 10Gb/s NRZ signal regeneration based on self-phase modulation (SPM) in a single highly nonlinear fiber (HNLF). The optical signal has been degraded by 2500 km length of transmission and has passed through the regeneration section. During the regeneration, the significant improvement of BER 10^-6 to BER 10^-12 is recorded. The simulation result for transmitter, degradation and regeneration sections are discussed to prove the effectiveness of the proposed system.

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MOGA tuned pi-fuzzy logic control for 3 phase induction motor with energy efficiency for electric vehicle application

B. S. K. K. Ibrahim, M. K. Hat, N. Aziah M. A. and M. K. Hassan

Induction motor (IM) is one of the Alternating Current (AC) motor having simple and rugged structure; moreover, they are economical and immune to heavy overloads. However the use of induction motor also has its disadvantages, mainly the controllability, due to its complex mathematical model and its nonlinear behavior. The conventional controllers are unable to handle this problem. To overcome this problem a nonlinear PI- fuzzy logic controller and the used of Multi objective Genetic Algorithm (MOGA) optimization to minimizing the error is used to control the speed of electric vehicle traction motor. The development of this control strategy with Energy Efficiency is presented in this paper. The proposed controller has simple structure and also due to its modest fuzzy rule in rule- base is relatively easy for implementation. The control is performed by Matlab/ Simulink software. The simulation test results have been satisfactory in simulation results and demonstrated to confirm the performance of the MOGA optimized fuzzy can reduce the power consumption with good tracking performance. This controller has high accuracy, suitable performance, high robustness and high tracking efficiency.

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Steerable array antenna

N. A. Salleh, N. Abdullah and E. Mohd

This paper presents the design of an electronically steerable array antenna. An adaptive antenna using a slotted patch antenna for WLANs operated at 2.4 GHz is proposed. The designed antenna has five elements array, one for active elements and the remaining four are passive elements which connected to the variable reactance circuit. The variable reactance value will vary the beam pattern of the antenna. For the simulation, OFDM signal is used for the incoming signal and interference. Correlation between HGI and TGI is calculated as an objective function of the algorithm. A downhill simplex algorithm is used to maximize the cost function. From numerical simulation, null is performed for the incoming interference.

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Study of phase sensitive amplifier (PSA) characteristic for 80 gbit/s dpsk data input signal

N. N. Shamsuddin, N. S. Mohd Shah, S. N. S Mat Yaacob and B. Das

Simulation of phase sensitive amplifier (PSA) of differential phase shift keying (DPSK) data signal in dual pump is presented. The PSA is designed and simulated using OptiSystem software. A dual pump PSA based on cascaded fiber optic parametric amplifier (FOPA) of 80Gbit/s DPSK data signal is investigated in detail on its gain and noise figure. Results show that PSA has higher gain and lower noise than Phase Insensitive Amplifier (PIA).

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Influence of tio₂ thin film annealing temperature on electrical properties synthesized by CVD technique

F.N. Mohamed, M.S. A. Rahim, N. Nayan, M.K. Ahmad, M.Z. Sahdan and J. Lias

Titanium dioxide (TiO₂) thin film deposited onto a glass substrate by varying the parameter of annealing temperature using chemical vapor deposition (CVD) technique to investigate the electrical properties. TiO₂ thin film annealed at the temperature of 300°C, 800°C and 1000°C before characterizations done using Atomic Force Microscope (AFM), X-Ray Diffraction (XRD), Ultraviolet-Visible spectroscopy (UV-Vis), Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscope (FE-SEM) and two point probe I-V measurement. The effects of anneal temperature on TiO₂ thin film surface morphology and electrical properties were studied intensively. The results obtained indicate that when a chemical modification were done, the properties of the TiO₂ thin film changed as well. From the AFM image, the roughness of TiO₂ thin film surface morphology increased as the annealing temperature increased. The electrical properties on the other hand, also increased as the temperature increased. Vice versa, the resistivity of the TiO₂ thin film decreased as annealing temperature increased. As expected, it is found that, heat treatment affecting TiO₂ surface morphology in term of roughness and indirectly changed the resistivity of TiO₂ due to the temperature applied on the thin film.

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Improvement of voltage sag mitigation using dynamic voltage restorer (DVR)

Hadi Suyono, Lauhil Mahfudz Hayusman and Moch. Dhofir

The modeling and analysis of Dynamic Voltage Restorer (DVR) implementation for improving the voltage sag due to the motor starting and disturbance occurred in the system is discussed in this paper. DVR is installed through a transformer in series connection between the feeder and a sensitive load to compensate the voltage sag. To show the impact of DVR implementation, the dynamic analysis is performed with the following short-circuit scenarios such as single-phase-, double-phase-, and three-phase to ground faults. In addition, the voltage sag due to the motor starting is also investigated in this paper. Based on the simulation results show that the voltage sag reach 0.83pu, 0.78pu, and 0.69pu for the single-, double-, three-phase to ground faults implemented repectively. The DVR implementation mitigates the voltage sag with improving the voltage up to 0.99pu, 0.95pu, and 0.91pu for the single-, double-, three-phase to ground faults cases respectively. The DVR implementation also improves the voltage profile during the motor starting of the largest motor load with a capacity of 55 kW up to 0.99pu instead of without the DVR implementation which the voltage sag reach to 0.92pu. The increasing of voltage profile improvement on the system will need more active and reactive powers acquired from the DVR.

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Development of red blood cell analysis system using NI vision builder AI

Razali Tomari, Jalil Lias, Rabiatuladawiah Musa and Wan Nurshazwani Wan Zakaria

Red blood cell (RBC) diagnosis is very important process for early detection of blood related disease such as malaria and anemia before suitable follow up treatment can be proceed. Conventional method is conducted by pathologist by manually count and classifies the viewed cell under light microscope. Such process is tedious and required highly skill and experience pathologist to analyze the shape of the red blood cell and consequently counting its number. In this paper an automated RBC counting and classification system is proposed by using National Instrument (NI) Vision Builder Automated Inspection (AI) tool to speed up the time consumption to analyze the RBC and to reduce the potential of the wrongly identified RBC. Initially the RBC image undergoes image pre-processing steps which involved global threshold of method applied green channel color image. Then it continues with RBC counting by using particle area and calculator numeric function method. Eventually, Heywood Circularity Factor method is applied for normal and abnormal RBC classification. The proposed method has been tested on blood cell images and the effectiveness and reliability of the system has been demonstrated.

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Design and implementation of vehicle mounted wind turbine

Md Rabiul Awal, Muzammil Jusoh, Md Nazmus Sakib, Fakir Sharif Hossain, Mohd Rashidi Che Beson⁴ and Syed Alwee Aljunid

Vehicle Mounted Wind Turbine (VMWT) is a mounted horizontal axis wind turbine system for vehicles. This paper presents design and implementation of VMWT to generate electricity from vehicle. VMWT has several smart features including high rpm turbine, convenient weight, practical shape and portability. In addition, this paper evaluates the VMWT performance in terms of power generation. It is shown that, with proper designing, VMWT can generate approximately 200 W of power at vehicle speed of 80 km/hr. A number of design considerations have taken into account for designing VMWT to ensure its proper functionality in practical environment.

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Frequency restrictions for wireless power transfer of implantable medical devices

Md Rabiul Awal, Muzammil Jusoh, Mohd Rashidi Che Beson, Thennarasan Sabapathy, Muhammad Ramlee Kamarudin and Md Rubel Basar

Wireless power transfer (WPT) system is turning to be a reliable strategy to power implantable devices. However, WPT possess strong reactive near-field to induce electric fields in the body tissue of implant wearer. In addition, implantable devices with WPT may be exposed to the unwanted strong electromagnetic field and be disturbed functionally. These may pose potential direct health hazards or serious damage to the function of health via interference with medical implants. In this paper, the safety guidelines from different responsible organization are reviewed and discussed in the context of human safety. Based on the discussion and literature review, the effect and affect of state-of-the-art of the existing guidelines are discussed. As an outcome, several needs to be added as the extension of safety guidelines for coverage of persons with implants, more computationally efficient fullwave solvers, more reliable human models has to be introduced.

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Symmetric uplink and downlink transmissions for non-saturated wlan in fiber-wireless networks

Wan Hafiza Wan Hassan, Horace King, Shabbir Ahmed and Mike Faulkner

The convergence of optical and wireless technologies holds great promise for the development of future broadband access networks. As such, we work on the idea of integrating the gigabits passive optical network (GPON) with infrastructure-based wireless local area network (WLAN) to realize fiber-wireless (Fi-Wi) networks. The study focuses on the enhancement of the wireless side which is seen as the critical bottleneck because the wireless channel is shared by all WLAN access points (‘closed system’). The binary exponential backoff (BEB) algorithm in the standard WLAN is the key factor that leads to the throughput degradation and the unfairness between uplink and downlink transmissions. Therefore, two techniques are proposed to overcome the limitations and improve the end user performance in a non-saturated condition. The first technique exploits the accessible content of the GPON control frame and modifies the legacy BEB scheme by introducing optimum constant contention window (CW) sizes. The second technique is a transmission priority scheme that provides symmetric uplink and downlink transmissions for wireless users (WU) and their serving access points (AP).

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Wireless vehicular network based commercial advertisment dissemination (VCAD)

Suzi Iryanti Fadilah, Mohd Helmy Abd Wahab^, Abdul Samad Shibghatullah and Wan Nur Wahidah Hashim

The VANET will facilitate new applications for e-business that will revolutionize the driving experience, providing everything from instant, localized traffic updates to warning signals when the vehicle ahead abruptly brakes. In the emerging global economy, e-business has increasingly become a necessary component of business strategy and a strong catalyst for economic development. In near future, vehicles may be equipped with short-range radios capable of communicating with other vehicles and highway infrastructure using a VANET. Mobile Advertisement is a location-aware dissemination solution built on top of a vehicular ad-hoc network. We envision a network of 802.11p that dynamically disseminate data to clients running on the car’s smart device. The approach can be considered an alternative to the static advertisement billboards and can be useful to business companies wanting to dynamically advertise their products and offers to people driving their car. The clients can subscribe to information based on specific topics. We present design solutions that use RSU in 802.11p network for transmitting messages to wireless-enabled devices equipped on vehicles. We also present implementation details for the evaluation of the proposed solution using a simulator designed for VANET application.

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Investigation of non chirped NRZ, chirped NRZ and alternate-chirped NRZ modulation techniques for free space optic (FSO) systems

Rezki El Arif, M.B. Othman and S.H. Pramono

Free Space Optics (FSO) is the technology where transmission occurs through optical waveform that contains data transformed at the transmitter from electrical signal. Since the transmission medium of FSO is atmosphere, atmospheric scattering is the major cause for interruption of FSO link. Non return zero (NRZ) modulation is the dominant modulation scheme employed in commercial terrestrial Free Space Optic (FSO) communication systems. This research are required to investigate three viable modulation techniques; non-chirped NRZ, chirped NRZ, and alternate-chirped NRZ at 10 Gb/s and 40 Gb/s data rate. The 1550 nm of continuous wave (CW) laser is modulated with three different modulation formats over 1 km of FSO channel. The signal is propogated at different attenuation value based on Malaysia weather conditions. In this paper we have successfully compared the three modulation techniques in FSO system due to the Malaysia weather and the performance is accessed at bit error rate (BER) of 1x10^-9. The presented simulation of these three modulation shows that alternate-chirped NRZ has slightly better performance compared to the non-chirped NRZ and chirped NRZ modulation format at clear weather, haze, light rain, medium  rain and heavy rain. We believe that, this system is an alternative for the future optical wireless network that has a potential to be installed in the urban and sub-urban area.

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Design and analysis of minkowski fractal antenna

Noorsaliza Abdullah, Abdirahman Mohamud Shire, Munsar Abdi Ali and Ezri Mohd

Minkowski technique is proposed in this paper in order to design dual-band microstrip antenna with frequency bands of 1.8 GHz and 2.4 GHz. The conventional microstrip patch antenna has single band in which its return loss is -25.92 dB at 2.4 GHz. The CST simulated results show that when Minkowski fractal microstrip antenna is designed, the antenna operates with two frequency bands for return loss of -19.301 dB and -39.575 dB at 1.8 GHz and 2.4 GHz respectively.  The antenna is fabricated on FR-4 substrate with permittivity of 4.3 and thickness of 1.6 mm.

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Tri-band planar inverted f-antenna (PIFAa) for GSM bands and bluetooth applications

M. A. Yasin, W. A. M. Al-Ashwal, A. M. Shire, S. A. Hamzah and K. N. Ramli

Recently, the demand for wireless devices that support multi-band frequency has increased. In fact, employing single-band antennas leads to large space requirement in handheld devices. Therefore, due to the space constraints in mobile devices, an antenna which will cover multiple bands of frequencies will be the best solution in order to allow more space in the mobile devices. The integration of such technology in mobile communication system has led to a great demand in developing small size antenna with multi-band operation that is able to operate in the required system. In this paper, a triple band planar inverted-F antenna (PIFA) is proposed. The antenna has been measured and found to operate at three operating frequencies of GSM bands (900 MHz and 1800 MHz), and Bluetooth band (2400 MHz). A dual L-shaped slot was used on the patch to obtain the triple-band resonant frequencies. Performance of the antenna has examined and results have shown that the proposed antenna can successfully cover frequencies 900 MHz, 1800 MHz and 2400 MHz.

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Web-based calorie information system

Nurulhuda Ismail, Nur Sabarina Ashikin bt Ahmad, Zarina Tukiran, Marlia Morsin and Eddy Irwan Shah bin Saadon

The Calorie Information System is a web-based system for a dietetic monitoring and assessment of calculating and controlling the amount of calories taken per day by the user. In this system, the measurement device is developed to measure user’s height and weight before the system displays the Body Mass Index (BMI), the Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR), and the amount of calories that should be taken based on a daily basis to the user. The amount of calories will be computed by the system is considering several factors; i.e. age, individual activity and gender of the users. In contrast, the calories consumed by the users will automatically calculate based on the type of food and drinks taken on that particular day. As a result, users can indirectly regulate excessive calorie intake on a daily basis by differentiating the calories required. All the user’s information is stored in the database server, which are able to be accessed every day. In addition, the health information is also provided in the system as well as an additional knowledge for the user to overcome any problem related to obesity and diet control. Thus, this system offers an alternative method to control calories in their daily life, therefore, reduce an obesity problem and improve the quality of human life.

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Computational fluid dynamics simulation of early diagnosis of deep vein thrombosis

Nur Shazilah bt Aziz, Nabilah bt Ibrahim, Noor Hafizzatul ‘Izzah bt Mat Harun and Kamil bin Abdullah

This paper presents a validation of in vivo experiment of early diagnosis of Deep Vein Thrombosis using Computational Fluid Dynamics method. This study was focusing on the pressure and also velocity of blood along the popliteal vein distribution. It is important to study the early stage of DVT as it could prevent tp the fatal injury to the patients. By using Ansys-CFX, the blood movement in the vein can be further analysed. The result of pressure shows that, the highest velocity value was 15.45 cm/s and the lowest velocity recorded was 0.73 cm/s.

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Real-time target selection based on electroencephalogram (EEG) signal

Muhammad Shaufil Adha, Norlaili Mat Safri and Mohd Afzan Othman

Electroencephalogram (EEG)-based mobile system are getting mainstream although the true potential of EEG signals are yet to be discovered. With the help of a specific control paradigm, the success rate of a mobile system to reach to a certain location could be increased. To further extend the existed control paradigm of EEG-Based mobile robotic system, this paper demonstrated the real time target selection of a wireless mobile robot using only human mind. A unique protocol was developed to mimic a scanning process while at the same time allowing subject to make a selection. Our system utilized only single EEG channel with no subject training. We statistically verify that it is feasible to select a target by manipulating only alpha content of EEG. We also show that it is hard to achieve a stable high performance of synchronous EEG-Based BCI application in one trial with a single frequency band. However, we found that the BCI’s performance in term of sensitivity are getting more stable with increase in trial.

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The optimal absorption of bilirubin using an optical fibre sensor

Mazuina Mohamad, Hadi Manap

This paper describes an optical fiber sensor for the monitoring of bilirubin concentration and commonly called jaundice An open path optical technique is used to analyze the absorption lines of bilirubin within the Ultra Violet/ Visible region. By using a wavelength corresponding to a bilirubin absorption peak, the Beer-Lambert Law can be used to relate the concentration of bilirubin surrounding the sensing portion to the amount of absorbed light. In the initial experiment, the absorption cross section for MAS bilirubin a product from Thermo Scientific was investigated and compare with theoretical data. Initially, an empty cuvette was used to measure incident intensity when the light passes through the empty cuvette. Then a cuvette was filled with bilirubin sample before measured the transmitted intensity The theoretical absorbance of bilirubin shows maximum absorption in the range of 400 nm to 600 nm. The experimental result shows the absorption line for measured MAS bilirubin is in similar pattern but the maximum absorbance shows in range 600 nm to 700 nm. This is due to the type of sample used in the experiment and high attenuation of the optical fiber used at the lower wavelength of UV light. Future work would be carried out to study the cross sensitivity of bilirubin absoprtion spectrum with other human blood molecules like hemoglobin (Hb), oxygen (O2) and carbon dioxide (CO2) to yield the best wavelength for the absorption.

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An optimized algorithm for simultaneous routing and buffer insertion in multi-terminal nets

C. Uttraphan and N. Shaikh-Husin.

In today’s VLSI design, one of the most critical performance metric is the interconnect delay. As design dimension shrinks, the interconnect delay becomes the dominant factor for overall signal delay. Buffer insertion is proven to be an effective technique to minimize the interconnect delay. In conventional buffer insertion algorithms, the buffers are inserted on the fixed routing paths. However, in a modern design, there are macro blocks that prohibit any buffer insertion in their area. Many conventional buffer insertion algorithms do not consider these obstacles. This paper presents an algorithm for simultaneous routing and buffer insertion using look-ahead optimization technique. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can produce up to 47% better solution compared to the conventional algorithms. Although research has shown that simultaneous routing and buffer insertion is NP-complete, however, with the aid of look-ahead technique, the runtime of the algorithm can be reduced significantly.

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Design of a shunt active power filter to mitigate the harmonics caused by nonlinear loads

D. M. Soomro, M. A. Omran and S. K. Alswed

Application of non-linear electrical devices has led to a distortion in the output sine waveforms of source current and voltage. It may lead equipment (connected to it) to overheat and sometimes cause damage. This paper concentrates on the design and application of three-phase shunt active power filter (SAPF) by using p-q theory to mitigate the harmonics which are created by nonlinear loads. To obtain result for this paper, the MATLAB/ Simulink was used as a simulation tool. The achieved results are within the recommended IEEE-519 standard i.e. less than 5% and also the power factor (PF) of the system to almost unity.

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Impact of feature reduction and operating temperature on gas identification

Muhammad Ali Akbar, Amine Ait Si Ali, Abbes Amira, Faycal Bensaali, Mohieddine Benammar, Muhammad Hassan and Amine Bermak

Tin-oxide based gas sensor requires an operating temperature typically in the range of 200°C to 400°C and its performance dependents on this temperature. In this paper a deep examination has been made to analyze the best operating temperature suitable for gas identification application in which an array of sensors is used along with an appropriate feature reduction algorithm. The two most common feature reduction algorithms for gas classification are principal component analysis (PCA) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA); both of them have been used in this analytical work. The feature reduction is followed by a binary decision tree (BDT) or K-nearest neighbor (KNN) based classifier. Results obtained with data from an array of sensors used for detecting C6H6, CH2O, CO, NO2 and SO2 indicates that at 400°C the BDT can classify 100% of gases after LDA based feature reduction, whereas KNN can classify 100% of gases at 200 °C and 300°C using data before and after feature reduction. Furthermore, experimental results from the given sensor data suggest that with and without considering the operating temperature the BDT can classify 96% of gases using first four LDA components. While KNN can classify 98% to 99% of gases using first four LDA or first five PCA components of resulting data obtained after feature reduction. Thus, after LDA-based feature reduction both classifiers provide superior identification with minimum number of components.

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Alternatives weighting in analytic hierarchy process of mobile culinary recommendation system using fuzzy.

Aryo Pinandito, Mahardeka Tri Ananta, Komang Candra Brata and Lutfi Fanani

Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is one of widely used method in supporting multi-criteria decision making. Allowing inclusion of many factors and criteria into the decision making process. Many situations in which AHP can be applied including ranking, prioritization, resource allocation, recommendation, and benchmarking. AHP utilizes scale in priority estimation for its alternatives and criteria. It is considered a problem if numerous alternatives were going to be judged manually by human. However, computing a recommendation using AHP with varying amount of alternatives and conditions has its own limitations especially in the alternatives priority judgment processes. In such a culinary recommendation system based on AHP in its recommendation method, it is possible to calculate a recommendation by using numerous food alternatives that is grouped into several categories and its priority estimation were computed based on several criteria. This research aims to develop a culinary recommendation system using AHP method in which the given alternatives weighting process were performed directly on the food alternatives or menus to represents the food category using fuzzy rather than evaluating the food categories itself. This research shows that a culinary recommendation system, which utilizes fuzzy in AHP alternatives weighting process, gives better recommendation result and accuracy.

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The implementation of personal monitoring system using histogram of gradient, haar classifier and eigenfaces for human detection and recognition

Z. Abal Abas, M. R. Ramli, A. S. Shibghatullah, H. Rahmalan, A. F. N. Abdul Rahman, Z. Zainal Abidin and B. Hussin

The development of personal monitoring system aims as an initial study for home surveillance system that covers only frontal view of human face. This study focuses on a combination of computer vision analysis and video surveillance which has a wide range of application in monitoring and surveillance system.  In general, the monitoring and surveillance system is vital in reducing crime cases as well as to protect public safety. Moreover, the development of personal monitoring focuses on two objectives; detecting the existence of human and performing face recognition for the detected human, which covers the pre-processing, processing and post processing stages. In the processing stage, background subtraction and Histogram of Gradient texture analysis techniques are used for human detection process. On the other hand, the Haar cascade and Eigenface recognizer techniques are used in the face recognition process.  As the results, the combinations of these techniques from two phases produce a better human identification and faster detection. The impact of the personal monitoring development system shows a successful achievement on human recognition as well as an accurate identification of personal monitoring.

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Design and modeling of planar lens antenna element in x-band applications

Abdisamad A. Awaleh, Samsul H. Dahlan, Raed A. Abdulhasan and Abdulrashid O. Mumin

This paper presents the modeling and design of compact planar lens antenna element in X-band applications. The antenna element is realized by using aperture-coupled patches with simple and less fabrication complexity phase-control mechanism. The lumped-element parameters of the equivalent circuit model were determined analytically considering the physical structure of the unit cell at 8 GHz. The proposed lens antenna element achieves phase shift range of 205° with almost uniform transmission coefficient of better than -1 dB. The equivalent circuit theoretical simulations were validated with CST MWS simulations and a very good agreement was demonstrated.

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Blog edge detection method for carotid artery ultrasound image

Suhaila Sari, Sri Erna Ervinna Asahrori, Hazli Roslan and Nabilah Ibrahim

Nowadays, ultrasound image is important and very useful in medical field. It is a technique used for visualizing body structures including tendons, muscles, joints, vessels and internal organs. For the atherosclerosis diagnosis, ultrasound imaging is commonly used because of the noninvasively assessment in monitoring condition inside the carotid artery. In certain conditions, the acquired images may be unclear caused by speckle noise and other factors. Thus, may affect the accuracy of artery wall detection. This study proposes an edge detection method that could detect edges in carotid artery images accurately without including noise or fine details by using the combination of the Bilateral Filter, Otsu Threshold and Gabor Filter. The Bilateral Filter is used to suppress the noise level in the input image. Otsu Threshold used to segment the regions into background and objects. The Gabor Filter is applied to detect edge accurately without including noise or fine details. From our simulation, the proposed method is capable of producing sharp edgemap image with less noise and detects edges accurately in comparison to conventional edge detection methods for different carotid artery ultrasound images.

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Boundary detection of kidney ultrasound image based on vector graphic approach

Wan Mahani HafizahWan Mahmud Raja Mohd Aizat Raja Izaham and Eko Supriyanto

This paper presents a new approach for boundary detection of kidney from three-dimensional ultrasound images. The technique proposed here is based on vector graphic image formation. Before converting the ultrasound image into vector graphic image, the region of interest (ROI) of the kidney for each slice was generated automatically. Some images also needed to be rotated to zero degree depending on the position of the kidney in the images. After the vector graphic formation, the boundary points of the kidney were identified. The error points were removed and the interpolation was then performed for contouring the kidney from its background. Experiments had been carried out step by step for validation purposes. Test result based on 30 kidney ultrasound image slices showed that the developed algorithms were able to detect 86.67% true ROIs. When compared to manual contouring, the sensitivity of this boundary detection technique was in between 94.95% to 97.75% and the specificity was in between 99.26% to 99.92%. Based on the results, it can be concluded that this new semi-automatic technique is reliable to be used for contouring the kidney from three-dimensional ultrasound images.

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Sequential process of feature extraction methods for artificial neural network in short term load forecasting

Muhammad Murtadha Othman, Mohd Hafez Hilmi Harun , Nur Ashida Salim and Mohammad Lutfi Othman

The first stage of feature extraction involves a transformation of raw data that is from the chronological hourly peak loads to the multiple time lags of hourly peak loads. This is followed by the next feature extraction wherein the principal component analysis (PCA) is used to further improve the input data which will significantly enhance the performance of ANN in forecasting the hourly peak loads with less error. The output of ANN is then converted to a non-stationary form which represents as the forecasted hourly peak load for the next 24 hour. The Malaysian hourly peak loads in the year 2002 is used as case study to verify the effectiveness of ANN in STLF.

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Optimal torque investigation of outer-rotor hybrid excitation flux switching machine for in-wheel drive EV

M. Z. Ahmad, E. Sulaiman, G. M. Romalan and Z.A. Haron

This paper present an optimal torque investigation of outer-rotor hybrid excitation flux switching machine (OR-HEFSM) for in-wheel drive electric vehicle (EV). Previously, most of the successful electric machines for electric drive in EV/HEV is interior permanent magnet synchronous motor (IPMSM) due to their ability to deliver high torque and power densities for great starting and climbing conditions. Nevertheless, the IPMSM has some demerit owing to high volume of permanent magnet (PM) used and unrobustness rotor. As an alternative candidates, flux switching machine (FSM) having robust rotor structure and higher torque capability has been proposed for EV/HEV drive and many research has been reported over the last decade. However, most of them are mainly focused on inner-rotor configuration. Therefore, in this paper the proposed OR-HEFSM is investigated to have maximum performances similar to IPMSM conventionally employed in existing HEV. Several defined parameters of OR-HEFSM are treated using determistic optmization method to attempt maximum torque performance. After several cycles of optimization investigation, the proposed machine has achieved the target maximum average torque and power of 335.08Nm and 160.2kW, respectively.

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Comparative study on a new permanent magnet flux switching machine configuration over segmental and salient rotor structure

M. Jenal, E. Sulaiman

In this paper, an investigation of a new structure of alternate circumferential and radial magnetization permanent magnet flux (AlCiRaF) permanent magnet flux switching machine (PMFSM) with different rotor configurations namely segmental rotor (SegR) and salient rotor (SalR) is presented. The proposed designs are briefly compared in regards to topology development, materials and conditions setting as well as properties setting. Consequently, coil arrangement tests are carried out to legalize the machine operating principle including position of each armature coil phase. Furthermore, the flux interaction between PM and armature coil, back emf, cogging torque at various rotor position, initial output power and torque performances are also investigated using 2D finite-element analysis (2D-FEA). The simulated result shows that the proposed 12S-10P AlCiRaF PMFSM with SalR rotor attains its highest output torque performances of 25.5 Nm at maximum Ja of 30Arms/mm² significantly over 60% greater than that of 12S-8P AlCiRaF PMFSM with SegR configuration.

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PSO-BP algorithm implementation for material surface image identification

Fathin Liyana Zainudin, Abd Kadir Mahamad, Sharifah Saon and Musli Nizam Yahya

Implementation of neural network for acoustic computation is not new. In this paper, a new improved method in predicting material surface from photographic image was implemented using a hybrid of particle swarm optimization and back-propagation neural network (PSO-BP) algorithm. Before the system classified the data using PSO-BP algorithm, the photographic images of room surfaces need to be extracted using Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) and Modified Zernike Moments. The result indicated that the PSO-BP algorithm have a higher accuracy compared to the BP algorithm, managed to record highest accuracy of 88% as opposed to 81.3% for the latter.

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Low cost and robust rotor three-phase wound-field switched-flux machines for hev applications

Faisal Khan, Erwan Sulaiman, Mohd Fairoz Omar and Hassan Ali Soomro

Wound-field switched-flux machines (WFSFM) have an intrinsic simplicity and high speed that make them well suited to many hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) applications. However, overlap armature and field windings raised the copper losses in these machines. Furthermore, segmented-rotor configuration is employed to enhance the characteristics of motor, however it made the rotor less robust and cannot be applied in high speed applications. To overcome these problems, this paper presents novel topologies for three-phase wound-field switched-flux machines. Both armature and field winding are located on the stator and rotor is composed of only stack of iron. Non-overlap windings and salient rotor are the clear advantages of these topologies as the copper losses gets reduce and rotor becomes more robust.  Design feasibility and performance analysis of 12 slots and different rotor pole numbers are examined on the basis of coil arrangement test, peak armature flux linkage, back emf and cogging torque by using Finite Element Analysis (FEA). Flux distributions, split ratio and average torque are also investigated for 12Slot-8Pole and 12Slot-7Pole WFSFM.

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Performance comparison of path planning methods

Omar R. B., Che Ku Melor C. K. N. A. H. and Sabudin E. N.

Path planning is one of the most vital aspects in robotics. Since the last few decades, it importance has been increasing due to the growing effort on the development of autonomous robots. Cell decomposition (CD), voronoi diagram (VD), probability roadmap (PRM) and visibility graph (VG) are among the earliest, most established and most popular methods in path planning. They have been used in many robotics path planning applications especially for autonomous systems. Before designing a path planning method, the three criteria i.e., path length, computational complexity and completeness have to be taken into account. This paper compares the performance of the above-mentioned path planning methods in terms of computation time and path length. For the sake of fair and conclusive finding, simulation is performed in three type of environments i.e., slightly cluttered, normally cluttered and highly cluttered. The finding shows that the visibility graph consistently produces relatively the shortest path while the voronoi diagram the longest. Shortest path is favorable for robots as the robots will consume less power/fuel and have an increased life cycle. However, the visibility graph is computationally intractable as in runs in polynomial time with respect to the number of obstacles. In contrast, PRM consumes the least time in planning a collision-free path. The finding of this paper could be used as a guideline about the performance in terms of path length and computation time for those who are interested in path planning using these four methods.

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Electromagnetic shielding by frequency selective surface

Syed Irfan Sohail and Mohammad Zarar

This paper presents a dual-layer Frequency Selective Surface (FSS) that exhibits a significantly wide stop-band of 9.5 GHz in 4.91-14.41 GHz range. It demonstrates more than 35 to 45 dB attenuation that can be effectively used to shield X-band satellite signals and in other low-profile stop-band and shielding applications. The unit-cell generates significant 98.3 bandwidth percentage. The design consists of two symmetrical patterns printed over the surfaces of FR4 layers. Due to simple schematics, it bears a low fabrication cost.

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A review of acoustic fdtd simulation technique and its application to underground cavity detection

M.N.H. Zahari, S.H. Dahlan and A. Madun

The feasibility of the Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) technique for acoustic wave created an opportunity for underground cavity detection that poses strong potential for acoustic wave spectrum application. The numerous significant advances have been attained to date, and more technological challenge awaits the optimization of an acoustic system to fill the gap between expectations and practical performance. Despite this tremendous progress, challenging issues related to the FDTD technique for acoustic wave simulation within the underground cavity detection yet to conclude. This review presents the development of the numerical approach in the acoustic wave simulation to excite pulse from the source, with particular emphasis being placed on the recent progress, a portion of travelling waves interact with the underground cavity structure and the cavity properties measurement of the cavity through different approaches.

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A two component red blood cell model for single cell mechanic

Ida Laila Ahmad and Mohd Ridzuan Ahmad

This work presents the deformation of red blood cell (RBC) as it travels in a microchannel using a theoretical model. The developed model predicts the deformation experienced by the RBC when exposed to shear stresses (fluid) as a function of mechanical properties. RBC is known to be a biconcave disk and is modeled as a liquid enclosed with a solid membrane. Therefore it is appropriate to model the RBC as a two component models consists of membrane and cytoplasm. The membrane, assumed to behave as a nearly incompressible material shows hyperelastic response to bending and shearing while the cytoplasm exhibits homogeneous Newtonian fluid properties. The model parameters were determined from the experimental measurements and comparison was made. Agreement in terms of hyperelasticity, deformation rate and stress distribution were found with previous researches.

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An empirical framework for automatic red blood cell morphology identification and counting

Razali Tomari, Wan Nurshzwani Wan Zakaria and Rafidah Ngadengon

In blood tests analysis identification of Red Blood Cell (RBC) morphology and count the RBC number is crucial to diagnose any symptoms of blood related disease. In current practice, such procedure is executed manually by a pathologist under light microscope. As the samples increased, manual inspection become laborious to the pathologist and since visual inspection is subjective, it might lead to variation to the assessed samples. To overcome such a problem, an automatic method is proposed by utilizing image processing procedure. Initially RBC regions are extracted from the background by using a global threshold method applied on a green channel color image. Next, noise and holes in the RBCs are abolished by utilizing a morphological filter and connected component labeling. Following that, geometrical information of the RBCs’ area is extracted to determine single and overlapping RBC region. The former region is further process to identify its morphology either normal or abnormal by using geometrical properties and Artificial Neural Network (ANN), while the latter will undergo cell estimation stage by using Circle Hough Transform (CHT) to estimate the number of individual cells. The proposed method has been tested on blood cell images and demonstrates a reliable and effective system for classifying normal/abnormal RBC and counting the RBC number by considering an overlapping constraint.

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Frequency selective surface for rf/microwave signal transmission in energy-saving glass

Syed Irfan Sohail, Mohammad Zarar

Presented here, the measured transmission of RF/Microwave signals in Energy-Saving Glass (ESG) using a dual-layer bandpass Frequency Selective Surface (FSS). The results demonstrate a wider 1.5 GHz bandwidth, confinement of Wi-Fi 2.45 GHz signals and less loss of heat due to only 9% removed coating. The unit-cell consists of two co-centric rings etched over the glass panels, placed close to each other.

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Multi-state uwb circular patch antenna based on wimax and wlan notch filters operation

This paper presents a multi-state reconfigurable UWB circular patch antenna with two notch filters. The two notch filters can be implemented using U-shaped and J-shaped slots embedded on the patch for WiMAX and WLAN frequency bands rejection. In order to add reconfigurable characteristics to the patch antenna, two copper strips are placed on the slots to represent the ON or OFF switching state of an ideal Pin diode. By using this simple switching technique, the current distribution of the patch changes and enables the antenna to have four modes of operation. The achieved results demonstrate that the antenna can function over the entire UWB working frequency range (3.1 GHz to 10.6 GHz) in one of the switching configurations. On the other hand, it rejects one or both WiMAX (3.13-3.7 GHz) and WLAN (5.15-5.85 GHz) frequency bands in the other three switching configurations. The antenna is simulated using electromagnetic simulation software CST Studio Suite. The obtained results were experimentally validated and good agreement was observed.

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Performance evaluation of voice over IP using multiple audio codec schemes

L. Audah, A.A.M. Kamal, J. Abdullah, S.A. Hamzah and M.A.A. Razak

The evolution of Voice over IP (VoIP) has made it one of the most popular applications over the wired/wireless Internet system due to its flexibility in technology integration and low cost of services. Telco and service operators have used the communication resources to optimize the VoIP architecture in order to provide better quality of service (QoS) to end consumers. The VoIP is a delay-sensitive traffic which requires minimum delay for general applications and minimum loss ratio for specific applications as the key QoS performance parameters. This paper compares the end-to-end (e2e) QoS performance parameters of VoIP codec schemes against multiple traffic connections transmitted over the Internet system. Background traffics are included in the simulations to closely match the real-world Internet scenario. Simulations analysis of bidirectional VoIP communications are done from the network layer perspective to compare the QoS performances of  G.711, G.729A, G.723.1 and GSM.AMR codec schemes against the incremental of active connections in the network system. The results show that the G.729A produces at least 2.81% better in term of average accumulative e2e delay. The G.711 produces at least 21.89% better in term of average accumulative e2e jitter but produces the worst e2e packet loss ratio. In addition, GSM.AMR shows the best e2e effective transmission rate ratio ranges between 42.67% and 89.82%. This study has investigated the QoS performance variations of VoIP codecs so that the results could be used as guidelines to estimate the optimal network resources for various traffic requirements as early as in the design stage. As for future works, this study suggests the adaptive priority queue and packet scheduling at Internet getaway to regulate the traffic based on per flow QoS requirements.

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Estimation of common mode radiated emissions from cables attached to high speed pcb using imbalance difference model

Ahmed M. Sayegh and Mohd Zarar M. Jenu

The functional (Differential-Mode) signals on Printed Circuit Board (PCB)-traces are not possibly responsible for higher emissions. However, they can induce unwanted Common–Mode (CM) signals on the nearby metallic structures such as PCB-attached cables. Commonly, PCB-attached cables can act as unintentional antenna resulting in higher emissions that may make the PCB easily fail to meet the Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC) regulatory compliance test. This process requires repeating all the product-building procedures to obtain the optimum design of the prototype, which increases the unit cost, as well as delay in the product marketing. Therefore, an early prediction of CM Radiated Emissions (RE) is helpful for circuit designers to avoid the RE issues before the first prototype is built. PCB- REs are estimated using 3D-full wave numerical solver. However, it is not practical option since it requires intensive computational time. It also does not provide insight into how the electric/magnetic coupling occurs. In this paper, the imbalance difference theory, which has shown successful demonstration in the low frequencies, is adopted for high frequencies. Based on this theory, a mathematical solution is developed for estimating CM-RE from cables attached to high speed PCB. For verification of the proposed model, an open-circuit PCB-configuration is used to validate the proposed mathematical model. Then, the results obtained from this model are compared with results obtained from 3D-HFSS full wave simulation and a good agreement is obtained between the two results.

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Meal simulation in glucose-insulin reaction analysis using hovorka model towards system-on-chip implementation

Nur Atikah Mohd Daud, Farhanahani Mahmud and Mohamad Hairol Jabbar

In this paper, a mathematical modeling concept is used to analyse the glucose-insulin interaction in managing Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus (T1DM). The Hovorka model has been chosen to design the glucose kinetics, so that the relationship between reactions of insulin to blood glucose concentration can be observed. This mathematical model implements a nonlinear ordinary differential equation where each parameter represents specific functions. The meal and exogenous insulin bolus are the two inputs in this mathematical model for prediction of glucose levels. The analysis of this model is done by using C++ programming language which is the first step towards system-on-chip (SoC) implementation for real time simulation based analysis of glucose-insulin dynamics.

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Coordinated multipoint (CoMP) in LTE-Advanced is considered as a promising way to enhance spectrum efficiency in interference-limited wireless network through base station (BS) cooperation. However, resource allocation is one of the key challenges faced by CoMP network because resource allocation strategy of one cell affects the other cells’ performance. Moreover, due to the scarcity of wireless network resources such as bandwidth and power, efficient resource allocation strategy is always desirable. In this paper, a low-complexity resource allocation strategy in CoMP that aims to achieve high network throughput is presented. The resource allocation strategy consists of three modules which are performed sequentially; user allocation module, subcarrier allocation module and power allocation module. Our simulation study shows that the proposed strategy gives significant performance gain in CoMP LTE-Advanced network.

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Cuckoo Search Strategy (CSS) is the newly developed strategy based on the Cuckoo Search Algorithm. In order to achieve best performance, a number of parameters in the Cuckoo Search Algorithm needs to be tuned namely the nest size, the elitism probability, and the repetition. This paper describes the tuning process for Cuckoo Search Algorithm involving t-way testing, that is, by taking the standard covering array involving CA (N, 2, 46). Our initial experiment results using obtained range of parameter values of CSS demonstration that CSS able to give sufficiently competitive results compared to existing work.

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The purpose of this study is to investigate the P300 event-related potentials (ERP) from background Electroencephalograph (EEG) of working memory performance by visual stimuli task. The proposed analysis for each channel at the prefrontal cortex is to compare the energy distribution via wavelet scalogram with the change of time and frequency of ERP signals. Wavelet energy distribution gives a lot of information for decomposing the frequency bands with necessary wavelet coefficient. This method was applied to data of normal children’s with age groups (7, 8 and 9 years old) in a visual stimulation. Results showed that an alpha band was chosen for ERPs analysis according to the high energy level in the scalogram graph. This consequence of the alpha band was supported by the theory of chose the suitable frequency for working memory task. From the P300 signals in alpha band, the young children (7 years old) have a significant increase of amplitude variability rather than others. During the working memory task, the alpha band was increased when age increase: 7yo (4.88 Hz), 8yo (6.84 Hz) and 9yo (7.81 Hz). In conclusion, it is verified that the alpha band varies as a function of working memory performance.

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Flow velocity is a critical information to have in order to ensure an optimum flow condition in a process plant. The combination of Electrical Capacitance Tomography and cross correlation technique has been successfully used to measure the velocity of multiphase flows. The peak of the cross correlated signals corresponds to the time taken by particles to move along the flow, thus its velocity can be derived. This paper investigates the capability of implementing an improved method of determining flow velocity by using a combined function of the cross correlation (CCF) and average squared differential (ASDF) functions in order to improve the accuracy of the velocity measurement. A velocity measurement simulation of a liquid/gas flow using MATLAB is employed and a comparison between the use of CCF and the combination of CCF/ASDF is made. The correlogram of the combined CCF/ASDF method has a sharper peak compared to the correlogram of the conventional CCF method, indicating that the peak of the function can be determined more accurately as the sharper peak can decrease the measurement uncertainty.

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Slotted Ultra Wideband (UWB) microstrip patch antenna with enhanced bandwidth is presented in this paper. The proposed antenna is simulated in CST Microwave Studio and fabricated for measurements. Its simulated result displays impedance bandwidth with S11 below -15 dB from 3.3 GHz to 19.53 GHz, whereas the measured result displays the operating frequency region from 3 GHz to 18.6 GHz. The antenna exhibits excellent UWB characteristics with the return loss of S11<-10 dB and Voltage Standing Wave Ratio (VSWR) = 2 throughout the impedance bandwidth. Besides, the antenna also displays good linearity and stable radiation patterns. This antenna has successfully exceeded the bandwidth of UWB requirement, which is from 3.1 GHz to 10.6 GHz, and can be suited easily with portable devices in wireless applications.

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In this present paper, a computationally realistic algorithm is adopted in order to obtain the critical clearing time (CCT) by means of one machine infinite bus (OMIB) equivalent system which has been derived from an equal area criterion (EAC). The CCT is defined as the highest time intermission by which the fault ought to be cleared with the aim of preserving the power system stability. The computation of CCT entails an essential numerical formulation derived from the three fault conditions, which are; pre-fault, during fault and post-fault conditions. The significance of CCT becomes considerably less whilst transient instability is induced by a three phase fault occurred at the bus bar next to the substation connected with a sensitive generator. By setting the protection relay with the obtained value of CCT, it is sufficient to maintain the transient stability albeit fault occurred at other locations. Throughout the occasion of fault, a circuit breaker which is in service earlier than the smallest CCT will not agitate to a transient instability. The IEEE Reliability Test System 1996 (RTS-96) is used to validate the robustness of the proposed methodology in determining the CCT.

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High speed train has been the most prominent transportation that been used by the public to save the travel time due to the road congestion especially during the peak hour. Most of people travel by trains for about forty to fifty minutes to reach their destination. In parallel with the development of high speed trains nowadays as the trains’ speed can reach up to 350km/h, there have been extensive researches to improve the data rates for mobile wireless communication. Higher data rate and reliable mobile communication are desirable when moving in high speed trains. The passengers on board usually play online application, surf internet, check emails, reading books and many more to kill time. As a solution, the latest LTE system seems to be a convincing platform to provide high data rates since it is expected to support high peak data rates of 1Gbps in downlink for low mobility and up to 100Mbps in high mobility environment. This paper provides the measurement analysis of current deployed network along high speed rail road. The results in this paper will be the pilot parameter to be analized further in order to improve mobile communication handover performance for high speed trains in LTE system.

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Combinatorial interaction testing is a practical approach aims to detect defects due to unwanted and faulty interactions. Here, a set of sampled test cases is generated based on t-way covering problem (where t indicates the interaction strength). Often, the generation process is based on a particular t-way strategy ensuring that each t-way interaction is covered at least once. Much useful progress has been achieved as plethora of t-way strategies have been developed in the literature in the last 30 years. Recently, in line with the upcoming field called Search based Software Enginering (SBSE), many newly strategies have been developed adopting specific optimization algorithm (e.g. Genetic Algorithm (GA), Ant Colony (AC), Simulated Annealling (SA), Particle Swarm Optimization, and Harmony Search Algorithm (HS) as their basis in an effort to generate the most optimal solution. Although useful, strategies based on the aforementioned optimization algorithms are not without limitation. Specifically, these algorithms require extensive tuning before optimal solution can be obtained. In many cases, improper tuning of specific parameters undesirably yields sub-optimal solution. Addressing this issue, this paper proposes the adoption of parameter free optimization algorithms as the basis of future t-way strategies. In doing so, this paper reviews two existing parameter free optimization algorithms involving Teaching Learning Based Optimization (TLBO) and Fruitfly Optimization Algorithm (FOA) in an effort to promote their adoption for CIT.

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An efficient system for characterization of nonlinear coefficient parameter in a highly nonlinear fiber (HNLF) and Zirconia-Erbium co-doped Fiber (ZrEDF) are demonstrated by using four wave mixing (FWM) technique. Interlaboratory comparison show that the values found with our method are in good agreement with the manufacture. Based on the FWM techniques, the nonlinear coefficient of HNLF is 10.7 W-1km-1 with the dispersion slope @ 1550 nm of 0.007 ps.nm-2km-1, zero dispersion wavelength (ZDW) of 1531 nm are obtained which is 0.93% error compared to the manufacturer’s datasheet values. For a 4 m long ZrEDF, a non-linear coefficient of 7.164 W-1km-1 @1565 nm is measured, along with chromatic and slope dispersion values of 1.03 ps/nm.km and 9.34 x 10-3 ps/nm2.km, which agree with the theoretical predicted values.

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This paper shall propose MyPostnatalSys as a framework to integrate the services of Traditional Malay Medicine (TMM) with modern medicine in the field of postnatal care. An unstructured interview was conducted to assess the current situation and capture the findings that could be used as input for developing the proposed framework.. The findings indicate that traditional Malay medicine and western or modern medicine are being treated in different systems and in isolation. MyPostnatalSys is proposed to integrate the services of these medicine systems via electronic health records using global system mobile and internet technology. Patient can access integrated healthcare services seamlessly and experience a more holistic treatment. In addition, the healthcare providers shall also benefit from the standardization of information exchange with other healthcare providers.

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Electricity has been one of the most important necessities for industrialization, increasing living standard of people around the world. Power electronic devices are applied in industry as well as in domestic appliances. The excessive use of these devices cause power quality (PQ) problems in the power system (PS), due to generation of harmonics. The consequences of harmonics include; increased probability in occurrence of resonance, neutral overload in 3-phase systems, overheating of all cables and equipment, loss of efficiency in electric machines, electromagnetic interference with communication systems, errors in measurements when using average reading meters, nuisance tripping of thermal protections. Many researches are being done to find out the best solution against the cause. For this, various tools and techniques are being improved and applied to mitigate such cause and enhance the PQ of the PS. One of the methods to mitigate harmonics is by designing and using passive filter. Moreover, it reduces the need of capacitor for supplying extra needed kVAr. Due to these two attracting features of Passive filter, its design and application can be found in many reasearches. The the main aspect of filter design has been challenging issue. This paper presents the optimal design of single tuned passive filter that its application is to mitigate harmonics in power frequency. The optimal parameters of this filter were calculated by using Lagrange interpolation method. The results were obtained by Matlab/simulation which shows the effectiveness of this filter.

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In these recent years, the number of mobile devices increase exponentially. All these Internet network mobile device services are supported by the mobility management protocols. However, data of these different types of mobility management protocols are not sufficient. Moreover, the design of network topology of these mobility management protocols are least developed. In this paper, we discover and develop the existing IPv6 mobility management protocols in On Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) and Wireless Mesh Network environment (WMN). The VANET is proposed to manage the inter network mobility management. The WMN is proposed to manage the intra network mobility management. We identify and analyze each IPv6 mobility management protocol’s characteristic and performance indicator. Then, we proposed to compare and enhance the performance of each IPv6 mobility management protocols in terms of latency, throughput and packet loss ratio. Through the proposed conducted numerical results, we are able to summarized the considerations of performance for Host-based mobility management protocols and Network-based mobility management protocols both in VANET and WMN.

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This paper presents the usage of Matlab-Simulink block diagram in order to create a controller block diagram based on mathematical equation and to be used as a tested controller for the inverters. The controllers which are the PI and PID controller have been used and been downloaded to the TMS320F28335 microcontroller board. These controllers and microcontroller have been applied to the three phase inverter and to the 2-level three phase multi-level-inverter. From the results, its show that, the controllers that been designed using the Simulink block diagram are able to communicate with the microcontroller for controlling the voltage output at the inverters.

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This paper presents a tapered baluns of microstrip-to-parallel strip transition using triangular structure with linear transition that suitable for a 3-dimensional (3-D) harmonic suppressed dipole antenna (3D-HSDA). The original balun consists of linear profile with the size of a quarter-wavelength for both the height and width with broadband characteristic (from 0 to 7 GHz). However, for some application such as narrowband HSA design, the suppression of the high operating band is needed. By using three open circuit stubs and three rectangular element of defected ground structure (DGS), two tapered baluns have been produced having the stop band feature from 2.1 GHz to 7 GHz of frequencies. They are named as balun-stubs and balun-DGS, respectively, that operate from 0 to 2 GHz. Simulated and measured results based on the return loss and insertion loss for these baluns were found to be better than -10 dB and -3 dB, respectively, from 0 to 2 GHz. The employment of the stubs and the DGS made these baluns the capability to reject the unwanted high frequency band. At last, these balun are integrated with dipole antenna for validation purpose. The results shows the antenna with balun-stubs and antenna with balun-DGS operates at 900 MHz and removed undesired higher order modes at 2.75 GHz, 4.47 GHz and 6.2 GHz without affecting the operating frequency.

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This study presents a minimum dataset designed to complement manual health record documentation in Traditional Malay Medicine (TMM) postnatal care. TMM postnatal treatment is widely sought after by Malay mothers during their confinement period. However, TMM healthcare providers either still utilize paper based records or do not provide proper documentation during treatment. This leads to unavailability of continuity and seamless healthcare services for TMM patients, making it fragmented from modern medicine. This research shall attempt to propose a minimum dataset for postnatal care as a foundation to facilitate integration of modern medicine and Traditional Malay Medicine. Data collection was conducted to establish a minimum dataset using structured interviews for participants involved in the postnatal care process - doctors, nurses and TMM practitioners. A total of nineteen core and fourteen additional clinical indicators were established. The results of this study shall serve as a basis to establish electronic health record research areas in the TMM field such as clinical decision support systems and e-health systems.

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A circularly polarized flat lens antenna element is presented in this article. The element is designed by using aperture-coupled patches with a common ground plane. A pair of identical cross-shaped slots is loaded on the common ground plane to realize circular polarization (CP). The desired phase error compensation and axial ratio performance for CP are achieved by tuning the slots dimensions. The proposed element achieves a very good 3 dB axial ratio bandwidth of 21%, phase shift range of 225° and low transmission coefficient of only 1.9 dB.This element employs a simple and less fabrication complexity mechanism for polarization conversion.

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This paper basically is the modeling and control of an electro-hydraulic actuator which is an important system. It is applied in systems like ships, airplanes, manufacturing systems, process systems, robots, flight and sailing simulators and others. The system was modeled using ARX modeling technique using the system identification toolbox in MATLAB. A fuzzy logic controller was then developed for the electro-hydraulic actuator using Simulink/MATLAB. The Sugeno type fuzzy logic was used and a conventional Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) controller was also developed for comparison. The fuzzy controller outperformed the PID controller, it yields zero steady state error, 2.8% overshoot and settling time of 0.36 seconds. The system response was better with the PID controller which has a 0.0021 or 0.21% steady state error, 4.8% overshoot and settling time of 0.32 seconds. The response parameters of the system without controller are 0.0010 or 0.1% steady state error, an undershoot of 1.4% and 0.54 seconds settling time. Therefore, the controller had improved the system in speed of operation as well as accuracy.

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This paper investigates Cooperative and Doppler diversity for Amplify-and-Forward (AF) relay network assuming the channel between Mobile Station (MS)s and Relay Station (RS)s as well as the channel between the RSs and Base Station (BS) are nonstationary. More specifically, this paper analyzes and demonstrates how both the Doppler and cooperative diversities can be achieved to improve the system performance of an AF relay network in high user mobility scenario. To facilitate the analysis, a model for Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) based AF relay is developed. The time varying channel is modeled using Basis Expansion Model (BEM). Using both models we present efficient signal detection methods which can exploit the Doppler spread to improve Symbol Error Rate (SER) performance. Theoretical analysis together with simulation results are presented to demonstrate the improvement on system performance.

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Near infrared (NIR) spectroscopic analysis has been widely evaluated in various areas due to its potential to be an alternative of numerous conventional measurement approaches that are time consuming, expensive, or destructive. This study evaluated the feasibility of adaptive linear neuron (Adaline) to be implemented as a variable selection approach to identify effective NIR wavelengths that can be used to predict the soil organic matter (SOM) so that a parsimonious model can be built. Adaline was optimized using its optimal learning rate and training adaptation cycles. After that, the effective wavelengths were identified based on the weight values of the best Adaline. The best predictive accuracy was achieved by the proposed Adaline that used 40 of the total 891 wavelengths with the root mean square error of prediction (RMSEP) and correlation coefficient of prediction (rp) of 2.163% and 0.9849, respectively. Findings show that the proposed variable selection approach by means of Adaline is capable of producing a parsimonious model that was able to predict the soil organic matter with better accuracy.

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This paper is concerned on designing and determining the absorption effect of ice-cream sticks pyramidal absorber (ISP absorber). The basic microwave absorber was design by cutting ice-cream sticks into pyramidal shape. In this paper, there are two type of ISP absorber which are coated with palm ash as absorbent material and without coated with absorbent material respectively. The absorption performances are analyzed and simulated by using CST Microwave Studio. The absorber was measured by using arch method for microwave frequency range of 8 GHz to 12 GHz in order to determine the absorption performance. Measured results showed absorber coated with palm ash produced the best performance in terms of signal absorption. This absorber promised green technology and low cost with reliable performance for various communication applications such as anechoic chamber.

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Wireless Vehicular Network is a system to realize information interoperability between vehicles and human, vehicles and roads, vehicles and vehicles, and transport facilities, through the network information exchange, in order to achieve the effective monitoring of the vehicle and traffic flow. While the essence of wireless vehicular network is actually to improve traffic efficiency and avoid accidents. Thus this paper aims to propose a new safety indicator called time gap interval for safe following distance (TGFD). TGFD incorporates vehicle dynamics and driver behavior factors that include the time component to broadcast and propagate suitable safety messages in vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) environment. Results from this simulation study indicate that the TGFD is comprehensive safety indicator for safety analysis.

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The barrel of a cannon is used to propel and stabilize the movement of a projectile out of its end at a high velocity. Some of the S-60 single-barrel 57mm anti-aircraft gun systems owned by the air defense artillery division of Indonesian army (Arhanud) still have to be operated manually to provide the direction course of the projectile following the target to be fired. This paper presents the design of target tracking control using PID-fuzzy logic hybrid method to be implemented on the anti-aircraft cannonry system. It is purposed to maintain the direction stability of the cannon barrel when it moves toward the desired direction, in terms of both azimuth and elevation of the target. It is shown that the implementation of PID and fuzzy-logic hybrid control method provides certain advantages, indicated with the conformity between the barrel movement along the azimuth and elevation directions and the input data given through a joystick.

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This paper presents the design of Proportional Integral (PI) controller with Real Time Interface (RTI) to improve the dynamic response of digitally control dc to dc boost converter. The experiments were done under several load variations. DS1103 dSPACE RTI has been used as an interface controller between hardware and software by using Matlab/Simulink model. The inputs and outputs from the hardware were connected to dSPACE PPC Controller Board CP1103. By using dSPACE RTI, the response time of the system could be observed in real-time. The results, showed that boost converter was capable to operate in fast response with the variation of output load. The PI controller was capable to achieve faster transient response, stable and was more robust with digital control.

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The plasmonic sensor has been developed for the detection of toxic materials in solution form. This system consists of a light source that is connected to a fiber optic duplex system with two arms. The first arm transmits light from the light source beam to the sample and the second arm sent the reflected light from the sample to the spectrophotometer. The sensing process was done in the sensor chamber made from Teflon with a sliding sample drawer is used to place the sample or known as sensing material. OOIBase32 was used to analyze the recorded spectrum from the spectrophotometer. In this study, the testing of the plasmonic sensor was carried out using targeted analyte namely boric acids with deionized water that is set as a reference medium. Two gold nanoparticles shapes which are gold nanosphericals and gold nanoplates were used as sensing materials. As a result, it was found that the plasmonic sensors with the gold nanoparticles as their sensing materials are sensitive toward the presence of targeted analyte. The sensing parameters are based on changing of their resonance peak position and its intensity.

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Concurrent fault detection plays a vital role in hardware implementation in order to prevent losing the original message This paper explores the new low-cost fault detection scheme for the S-box/ InvS-box of AES using a parity prediction technique. The predicted block was divided into seven blocks, to compare between the actual parity output and the predicted parity output results in the error indication flag for the corresponding block. The predicted blocks were developed with formulations compatible with the new S-box/ InvS-box simulated using 130nm CMOS technology, in Mentor Graphic environment. This proposed fault detection has achieved the total error coverage of about 99%. The total area implementation for the fault detection predicted parity block of the S-box/ InvS-box required 49 XORs, six XNORs, nine ANDs, one inverter, two ORs and one NAND gate. The proposed fault detection has the low hardware complexities which lead to a low cost and low power design.

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Nowadays, diffusion-based molecular communication (DBMC) is gaining recognition as a new physical layer option for nanoscale communication between bio-nanomachines, particularly for emerging applications in biomedical and healthcare. Although numerous studies have been conducted to evaluate and analyse DBMC system to date, investigation on multilayer DBMC channels still has had less attention in the literature. This paper presents an investigation of the delay spread in a multilayer DBMC channel. The results indicate that thedelay spread is depending on the averaged diffusion coefficient, transmission distance andthe data rate of transmitted bits, but not on the total number oftransmitted molecules.

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An improved Direct Torque Controlled (DTC) Induction Motor (IM) is reported in this paper with the aims to produce an adaptive flux controller design to realize the maximum efficiency in DTC IM drives. The value of reference flux is identified through the artificial intelligent neural network (ANN) algorithm with the input power as the objective function. The description of neural network control system as well as the training procedure is explained in this paper. Consequently, the proposed efficient optimizing controller yields an adaptive reference flux, which ensures a minimum input power that leading to the maximum efficiency of the drives systems is achieved. The proposed schemes have been developed and the performance of the IM Drive under different operating condition has been investigated through simulation and experimentally by using the Simulink/Matlab and digital signal processor of dSPACE. The promising results validate the effectiveness.

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This study has investigated and surveyed tactile pressure sensors, such as strain gauge, piezocapacitive, piezoelectric, piezoresistive, and pressure conductive rubber, according to robotic applications of these sensors. These tactile pressure sensors have been broadly used for robotic grasping operations. Moreover, through these tactile pressure sensors, the information on physical contacts and the external environment of robotic hand are reported and discovered. In this study, common piezoresistive pressure sensors (force-sensing resistor) have achieved favorable results in gripping an object; these results support that the piezoresistive technique is an appropriate approach for robotic implementations. Furthermore, two illustrative empirical findings have been performed using both rigid and pliable robotic claw surfaces. Experimental results have shown the correlation between input force and output voltage as well as the response of pressure sensor with different robotic claw resiliencies.

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In this paper, a new algorithm using wavelet properties to compress an image is proposed. This algorithm concern on reducing the wavelet coefficients produced by the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) process. The proposed algorithm start with calculating the threshold value by using the proposed threshold value estimator at wavelet detail subbands (Diagonal, Vertical and Horizontal subband). This proposed algorithm will estimate the suitable threshold value for each individual subband. The calculated threshold values are then applied to its’ respective subband. The coefficient with a lower value than the calculated threshold will be discarded while the rest are retained. The novelty of the proposed method is it use the principle of the standard deviation method of deriving the threshold value estimator equation. Experiments show that the proposed method can effectively remove a large amount of unnecessary wavelet coefficient with a higher Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and compression ratio as well as shorter elapse time.

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Compact ultra-wideband stepped-impedance low pass filter utilizing open circuit stub resonator

Nur Baya Mohd Hashim, Mohammad Shahrazel Razalli, Siti Zuraidah Ibrahim and Fazlina Farid

A novel microstrip low pass filter based on stepped-impedance is presented with compact size and wide stop band. The properties of a single open circuit stub resonator is investigated and connected in parallel to a conventional stepped-impedance low pass filter. As a result, the performance of the conventional filter is significantly improved by exibiting sharp response cut-off and better rejection level of stopband. The total size of the filter is only 21.48mm x 6.14mm with a cut-off frequency of 6.3GHz. On the other hand, wide stop band is achieved with attenuation level higher than 20dB is from 6.8GHz to 18GHz. The insertion loss is less than 1dB in the whole passband. The proposed filter is successfully verified in theory and simulated using full wave EM simulator.

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In the systems that are fed by batteries, the duration of the energy supplied to the system is of great importance. To use high efficiency-motors in these systems can extend the battery usage time and it can be said that obtaining high efficiency-motors used in low power applications is rather difficult. In this regard, in this paper, design and optimization of a brushless permanent magnet DC motor have been carried out successfully, especially for a system fed by battery. By considering the high efficiency criteria, rotor design parameters such as rotor geometry, thickness and placements of the magnets, and embrace factor have been carefully examined. By obtaining the optimal rotor geometry providing maximum motor efficiency, some informative theoretical and finite element analyses are carried out. Electrical and electromagnetic distributions gained by the changes in rotor design parameters are presented in graphics. As a result of successive steps in the paper, the efficiency is increased, the cogging torque and magnet consumption are reduced for the motor under consideration, which is 20W, 24V, 3000 rpm with an inner-type rotor.

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The demand of conventional vehicles which operates with internal combustion engine (ICE) has been increased with the increasing of the world population. However, it has led to the pollutant emissions which would affects to the global warming. Thus, to overcome this problem, auto-manufacturers has been introduced hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) which combined the ICE with battery based electric motor. Many researchers has been focus on a new machine which are known as flux switching machine. HEFSM becomes as a one possible candidates among the other FSMs due to the flux sources. Thus, a new structure of 12S-10P HEFSM with additional iron flux bridges has been developed to overcome the problem of C-Type stator core. Therefore, some design optimization is conducted to achieve the target torque and power which similar to the requirement of conventional HEVs, Prius ‘07. As a result, the optimum design has been successfully achieve the target torque and power, respectively.

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Exoskeleton is a type of wearable robots that can augment the performance of an able-bodied user. There are many studies that use hydraulic actuator to actuate the lower limb exoskeleton which possesses several drawbacks like dirty, noisy and high power consumption. Therefore, electrical actuators that are clean, silent and less power consuming are used in designing the lower limb exoskeleton in this project. Hence, this project is aimed to derive the mathematical model and joint torque equations, to design a lower limb exoskeleton using electrical motors from the market and to validate the design of the lower limb exoskeleton by simulation. This project shows the progress of selecting the electrical actuators for exoskeleton in accordance to the calculations and verifying the selections via simulations. In other words, this project serves as a guide to select appropriate electrical actuators for an exoskeleton robot.

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