Control of air-conditioning system for load management

The cooling system is one of the major and critical energy consuming loads in any premise. Efficient energy management of this critical load is important to achieve economic operation. Controlling the air conditioning (AC) system allows to reduce the peak consumption, indirectly the electricity bills. Due to privacy concerns, users’ participation and limitation of AC’s program interfaces is major obstacles in load management. In order to maintain the indoor comfort level and working efficiency, the users’ temperature set point is controlled by an adaptive control algorithm. Changing the AC’s temperature set-point into multiple time slot show the significant potential in electricity savings. Simulation model using PID controller based on load profile of ACs’ installed at Jabatan Penyiaran Negeri Johor will be conducted to determine the effectiveness of proposed control strategy. Then, field measurement is done based on group of AC’s unit and individual by setting its temperature set-point and operation time without any changes in comfort level. Both simulation and field measurement results show significantly peak load reduction of 56% which lead to lowering the overall electricity bill of premises

A tool to measure engineering students' design strategies and abilities

Malaysia is moving from service-based industries to knowledge-based industries to achieve Vision 2020. This is also in line with innovation-led economy and globalization. Hence, there is a pressing need to transform the current engineering education system to meet the ever-growing roles and responsibilities of contemporary engineers. Design is central to engineering activity because students can apply the theoretical knowledge into practice. Students' engineering design knowledge and abilities are unknown when they enroll into the engineering programs. These engineering programs are either too low or too advanced for the students' design abilities. Hence, dropout rates in the engineering programs escalate each year. The invention is an online questionnaire which will assist in determining students' engineering design knowledge and abilities. It will guide engineering faculties in identifying suitable candidates for their engineering program through the scores obtained by the students. The scores will determine the students' level of engineering design knowledge. This will function as a mechanism for the faculties to filter the candidates' knowledge of engineering design and reduce the number of dropouts from the engineering program