Quantitative infrared thermography resolved leakage current problem in cathodic protection system

Leakage current problem can happen in Cathodic Protection (CP) system installation. It could affect the performance of underground facilities such as piping, building structure, and earthing system. Worse can happen is rapid corrosion where disturbance to plant operation plus expensive maintenance cost. Occasionally, if it seems, tracing its root cause could be tedious. The traditional method called line current measurement is still valid effective. It involves isolating one by one of the affected underground structures. The recent methods are Close Interval Potential Survey and Pipeline Current Mapper were better and faster. On top of the mentioned method, there is a need to enhance further by synthesizing with the latest visual methods. Therefore, this paper describes research works on Infrared Thermography Quantitative (IRTQ) method as resolution of leakage current problem in CP system. The scope of study merely focuses on tracing the root cause of leakage current occurring at the CP system lube base oil plant. The results of experiment adherence to the hypothesis drawn. Consequently, res

Life jacket

Anyone who cannot swim well should wear life jacket whether they are in the water or around the water. Even those who are can swim well should wear the life jacket when they are doing activity such as swimming, fishing, boating or while doing any water-related activity. Life jacket is a kind of safety jacket that keeping the wearer float the in the water. The wearer may be in the conscious or unconscious condition but by wearing the life jacket we can minimize the risk of drowning because life jacket assist the wearer to keep floating in the water

Indicators for measuring satisfaction towards design quality of buildings

Design quality is an important component in measuring satisfaction towards total product quality (TPQ) of buildings, the product of construction projects. Design Quality Indicator (DQI), developed by the Construction Industry Council (CIC) in the UK looking at three quality fields, i.e. functionality, build quality, and impact of building in measuring the quality of design embodied in the buildings through feedback and perceptions of all stakeholders involved in the production and use of buildings. Design quality is always a major concern in the Malaysian construction industry. With inspiration from this DQI, this study was carried out to identify indicators for measuring the satisfaction towards design quality of buildings and to evaluate the suitability of the indicators for application in the context of Malaysian construction industry. Through literature survey, 32 indicators of design quality were identified and grouped into the three design quality fields. A questionnaire survey was carried out among Malaysian construction professionals (architects, engineers, quantity surveyors, contractors and developers) to assess the identified design quality indicators in terms of their relevance and significance in the context of construction industry in Malaysia. The survey reveals that access, natural lighting, access and use, structure element, landscape, finishes, location, external environment, urban and social integration and noise are among the design quality indicators that were perceived as the most important to be looked at. In overall, all the indicators are relevant for adoption in the Malaysian construction industry to measure the satisfaction towards design quality of buildings

Single phase inverter system using proportional resonant current control

This paper presents the harmonic reduction performance of proportional resonant (PR) current controller in single phase inverter system connected to nonlinear load. In the study, proportional resonant current controller and low pass filter is discussed to eliminate low order harmonics injection in single phase inverter system. The potential of nonlinear load in producing harmonics is showed and identified by developing a nonlinear load model using a full bridge rectifier circuit. The modelling and simulation is done in MATLAB Simulink while harmonic spectrum results are obtained using Fast Fourier Transfor. End result show PR current controller capability to overcome the injection of current harmonic problems thus improved the overall total harmonic distortion (THD)

Method of lines and runge-kutta method in solving partial differential equation for heat equation

Solving the differential equation for Newton’s cooling law mostly consists of several fragments formed during a long time to solve the equation. However, the stiff type problems seem cannot be solved efficiently via some of these methods. This research will try to overcome such problems and compare results from two classes of numerical methods for heat equation problems. The heat or diffusion equation, an example of parabolic equations, is classified into Partial Differential Equations. Two classes of numerical methods which are Method of Lines and Runge-Kutta will be performed and discussed. The development, analysis and implementation have been made using the Matlab language, which the graphs exhibited to highlight the accuracy and efficiency of the numerical methods. From the solution of the equations, it showed that better accuracy is achieved through the new combined method by Method of Lines and Runge-Kutta method

Design optimization for the two-stage bivariate pattern recognition scheme

In manufacturing operations, unnatural process variation has become a major contributor to a poor quality product. Therefore, monitoring and diagnosis of variation is critical in quality control. Monitoring refers to the identification of process condition either it is running within in statistically in-control or out-of-control, whereas diagnosis refers to the identification of the source of out-of-control process. Selection of SPC scheme becomes more challenging when involving two correlated variables, which are known as bivariate quality control (BQC). Generally, the traditional SPC charting schemes were known to be effective in monitoring aspects, but there were unable to provide information towards diagnosis. In order to overcome this issue, many researches proposed an artificial neural network (ANN) - based pattern recognition schemes. Such schemes were mainly utilize raw data as input representation into an ANN recognizer, which resulted in limited performance. In this research, an integrated MEWMA-ANN scheme was investigated. The optimal design parameters for the MEWMA control chart have been studied. The study focused on BQC with variation in mean shifts (μ = ±0.75 ~ 3.00) standard deviations and cross correlation function (ρ = 0.1 ~ 0.9). The monitoring and diagnosis performances were evaluated based on the average run length (ARL0, ARL1) and recognition accuracy (RA) respectively. The selected optimal design parameters with λ=0.10, H=8.64 gave better performance among the other designs, namely, average run length, ARL1=3.24 ~ 16.93 (for out-of-control process) and recognition accuracy, RA=89.05 ~ 97.73%. For in-control process, design parameters with λ=0.40, H=10.31 parameter gave superior performance with ARL0 = 676.81 ~ 921.71, which is more effective in avoiding false alarm with any correlation

Events Recognition System for Water Treatment Works

The supply of drinking water in sufficient quantity and required quality is a challenging task for water companies. Tackling this task successfully depends largely on ensuring a continuous high quality level of water treatment at Water Treatment Works (WTW). Therefore, processes at WTWs are highly automated and controlled. A reliable and rapid detection of faulty sensor data and failure events at WTWs processes is of prime importance for its efficient and effective operation. Therefore, the vast majority of WTWs operated in the UK make use of event detection systems that automatically generate alarms after the detection of abnormal behaviour on observed signals to ensure an early detection of WTW’s process failures. Event detection systems usually deployed at WTWs apply thresholds to the monitored signals for the recognition of WTW’s faulty processes. The research work described in this thesis investigates new methods for near real-time event detection at WTWs by the implementation of statistical process control and machine learning techniques applied for an automated near real-time recognition of failure events at WTWs processes. The resulting novel Hybrid CUSUM Event Recognition System (HC-ERS) makes use of new online sensor data validation and pre-processing techniques and utilises two distinct detection methodologies: first for fault detection on individual signals and second for the recognition of faulty processes and events at WTWs. The fault detection methodology automatically detects abnormal behaviour of observed water quality parameters in near real-time using the data of the corresponding sensors that is online validated and pre-processed. The methodology utilises CUSUM control charts to predict the presence of faults by tracking the variation of each signal individually to identify abnormal shifts in its mean. The basic CUSUM methodology was refined by investigating optimised interdependent parameters for each signal individually. The combined predictions of CUSUM fault detection on individual signals serves the basis for application of the second event detection methodology. The second event detection methodology automatically identifies faults at WTW’s processes respectively failure events at WTWs in near real-time, utilising the faults detected by CUSUM fault detection on individual signals beforehand. The method applies Random Forest classifiers to predict the presence of an event at WTW’s processes. All methods have been developed to be generic and generalising well across different drinking water treatment processes at WTWs. HC-ERS has proved to be effective in the detection of failure events at WTWs demonstrated by the application on real data of water quality signals with historical events from a UK’s WTWs. The methodology achieved a peak F1 value of 0.84 and generates 0.3 false alarms per week. These results demonstrate the ability of method to automatically and reliably detect failure events at WTW’s processes in near real-time and also show promise for practical application of the HC-ERS in industry. The combination of both methodologies presents a unique contribution to the field of near real-time event detection at WTW