Supervisory control for conventional unitary air conditioning system

The Supervisory control for conventional unitary air conditioning system is conceptually designed based on Programmable Logic Control (PLC) system. The advantage of PLC system is that it allows online monitoring continually and updates or modification can be performed interactively. This supervisory mode is applied to the conventional unitary air conditioner to avoid the frequent interruption or adjustment of the fan speed or temperature set point by users normal practice which has contributed to the surge of energy consumption due to the frequent on/off of the compressor. Three experiments have been performed at different control methods to simulate user’s daily practice. The first control method is the Variable Set point with high speed fan, the second control method is the Fixed Set point with high speed fan and the third control method is a Supervisory Control; a fixed set point with variable fan speed. The experiments have been conducted for eight (8) hours and the statistic data of accumulated energy consumption based on one unitary air conditioner with capacity of 1 Horse Power are acquired and sampled at the time interval of 30 minutes for the analysis. From these experiments, the supervisory control has consumed 4.2 kWh per day which is 82.35% compared to normal consumption of 5.1 kWh. This result translated into 0.9 kWh or 17.65% of total energy saving per day. The consistency of the air compressor operation in this control method has become a major factor in achieving indoor temperature steadiness whilst improving the energy savings

Study mass transfer of Cd, Hg, As, DDT and chlordane through adsorption onto granular activated carbon

The kinetic theory of liquid indicates that diffusion coefficient for the dilute liquid at ordinary pressure is essentially independent of mixture composition. Mass transfer is important in separation and adsorption process. However, diffusion may also be caused by other features. Because of the complex nature of mass diffusion, the diffusion coefficients are usually determined experimentally. The mass transfer resistance controls the kinetic adsorption rate, but there is only limited understanding of the adsorption of a solute onto porous material from surface water. Thus, this study was conducted to further enhance the understanding of the mass transfer and adsorption processes of micropollutants. The objectives of this study are to analyze the difference, examine the adsoprtion diffusion of mass transfer and evaluate the variation of total, internal and external mass transfer. This study also used the transformed equation to analyze the rate of adsorption during adsorption process onto different GACs. Five (5) micropollutants namely Hg, Cd, As, DDT and chlordane have been chosen to be adsorbed onto three (3) granular activated carbon which are SIG (shell industrial grade), SAG (shell analytical grade) and BAG (bitumen analytical grade). The micropollutants (Hg, Cd, As, DDT and chlordane) were prepared using standard stock solution in deionized water. Adsorption of pollutants onto SIG, SAG, and BAG were started at different percentages of outflow. Although the samples were taken at the same time, the outcome showed that a significant competition between adsorbates and adsorbents. From the analysis, SIG and SAG displayed excellent performance in adsorbing inorganic micropollutants while BAG for organic micropollutants. Before adsorption takes place, the morphology of the SAG indicated pore abundance compared to SIG and BAG. BAG pores are more structured than SIG and SAG. After adsorption occurs, more of the organic micropollutants are being adsorbed onto BAG and SAG. Meanwhile, SIG proved to be the best adsorbent for inorganic micropollutants. It takes 72 hours for Hg vi and As to saturate SIG whilst Cd take a longer time of 80 hours. SAG was also a good adsorbent for organic elements, with DDT taking 52 hours and chlordane taking 48 hours to be adsorbed. The [KLa]f value for the adsorption of Hg onto SIG was significant and the [KLa]d value for the adsorption of Hg onto SIG was higher onto SAG and BAG. The value of [KLa]f for SIG at 6% outflow was 0.6862 h-1, with values of [KLa]d at -0.4142 h-1 and [KLa]g at 0.2721 h-1, while for the adsorption of Cd it was shown that the [KLa]f values for the adsorption of Cd onto BAG was the most significant and the [KLa]d values for the adsorption of Cd onto SIG was higher than SAG and BAG at 2% outflow, with values of 0.7044 h-1, [KLa]d at -0.3687 h-1, and [KLa]g at 0.3356 h-1. In contrast, for As the [KLa]f for the adsorption of As onto BAG at 4% outflow was 0.6722 h-1 and [KLa]g was 0.3103 h-1. For DDT, the [KLa]f value of DDT for BAG at 0.5% outflow was 1.6662 h-1, [KLa]d was -1.2702 h-1 and [KLa]g was 0.3959 h-1. In the case of DDT, the value of [KLa]f for the adsorption of chlordane onto BAG at 2% outflow was 0.7330 h-1 and [KLa]d was started to activate the adsorption -0.5567 h-1. [KLa]g at 2% outflow was 0.1763 h-1. From these values we can conclude that for the adsorption of inorganic substances, SIG proved to be the best, while for organic substances BAG is the best adsorbent

A Framework for Active Learning: Revisited

Over the past decade, algorithm visualization tools have been researched and developed to be used by Computer Science instructors to ease students’ learning curve for new concepts. However, limitations such as rigid animation frameworks, lack of user interaction with the visualization created, and learning a new language and environment, have severely reduced instructors’ desire to use such a tool. The purpose of this project is to create a tool that overcomes these limitations. Instructors do not have to get familiar with a new framework and learn another language. The API used to create algorithm animation for this project is through Java, a programming language familiar to many instructors. Moreover, not only do the instructors have control over planning the animation, students using the animation will also have the ability to interact with it

Animating the development of Social Networks over time using a dynamic extension of multidimensional scaling

The animation of network visualizations poses technical and theoretical challenges. Rather stable patterns are required before the mental map enables a user to make inferences over time. In order to enhance stability, we developed an extension of stress-minimization with developments over time. This dynamic layouter is no longer based on linear interpolation between independent static visualizations, but change over time is used as a parameter in the optimization. Because of our focus on structural change versus stability the attention is shifted from the relational graph to the latent eigenvectors of matrices. The approach is illustrated with animations for the journal citation environments of Social Networks, the (co-)author networks in the carrying community of this journal, and the topical development using relations among its title words. Our results are also compared with animations based on PajekToSVGAnim and SoNIA

Animating the evolution of software

The use and development of open source software has increased significantly in the last decade. The high frequency of changes and releases across a distributed environment requires good project management tools in order to control the process adequately. However, even with these tools in place, the nature of the development and the fact that developers will often work on many other projects simultaneously, means that the developers are unlikely to have a clear picture of the current state of the project at any time. Furthermore, the poor documentation associated with many projects has a detrimental effect when encouraging new developers to contribute to the software. A typical version control repository contains a mine of information that is not always obvious and not easy to comprehend in its raw form. However, presenting this historical data in a suitable format by using software visualisation techniques allows the evolution of the software over a number of releases to be shown. This allows the changes that have been made to the software to be identified clearly, thus ensuring that the effect of those changes will also be emphasised. This then enables both managers and developers to gain a more detailed view of the current state of the project. The visualisation of evolving software introduces a number of new issues. This thesis investigates some of these issues in detail, and recommends a number of solutions in order to alleviate the problems that may otherwise arise. The solutions are then demonstrated in the definition of two new visualisations. These use historical data contained within version control repositories to show the evolution of the software at a number of levels of granularity. Additionally, animation is used as an integral part of both visualisations - not only to show the evolution by representing the progression of time, but also to highlight the changes that have occurred. Previously, the use of animation within software visualisation has been primarily restricted to small-scale, hand generated visualisations. However, this thesis shows the viability of using animation within software visualisation with automated visualisations on a large scale. In addition, evaluation of the visualisations has shown that they are suitable for showing the changes that have occurred in the software over a period of time, and subsequently how the software has evolved. These visualisations are therefore suitable for use by developers and managers involved with open source software. In addition, they also provide a basis for future research in evolutionary visualisations, software evolution and open source development

Improvements on a simple muscle-based 3D face for realistic facial expressions

Facial expressions play an important role in face-to-face communication. With the development of personal computers capable of rendering high quality graphics, computer facial animation has produced more and more realistic facial expressions to enrich human-computer communication. In this paper, we present a simple muscle-based 3D face model that can produce realistic facial expressions in real time. We extend Waters' (1987) muscle model to generate bulges and wrinkles and to improve the combination of multiple muscle actions. In addition, we present techniques to reduce the computation burden on the muscle mode

Shape Animation with Combined Captured and Simulated Dynamics

We present a novel volumetric animation generation framework to create new types of animations from raw 3D surface or point cloud sequence of captured real performances. The framework considers as input time incoherent 3D observations of a moving shape, and is thus particularly suitable for the output of performance capture platforms. In our system, a suitable virtual representation of the actor is built from real captures that allows seamless combination and simulation with virtual external forces and objects, in which the original captured actor can be reshaped, disassembled or reassembled from user-specified virtual physics. Instead of using the dominant surface-based geometric representation of the capture, which is less suitable for volumetric effects, our pipeline exploits Centroidal Voronoi tessellation decompositions as unified volumetric representation of the real captured actor, which we show can be used seamlessly as a building block for all processing stages, from capture and tracking to virtual physic simulation. The representation makes no human specific assumption and can be used to capture and re-simulate the actor with props or other moving scenery elements. We demonstrate the potential of this pipeline for virtual reanimation of a real captured event with various unprecedented volumetric visual effects, such as volumetric distortion, erosion, morphing, gravity pull, or collisions