Recycling of waste heat produced from air-conditioning outdoor unit via thermoelectric generator for non-intrusive and clean energy harvesting

Non-renewable resources are depleting day by day. As an alternative source of non-renewable energy, one of the renewable and green energies which can be harvested by end users is from harvesting thermal energy from our surroundings. The air conditioning system produces a substantial amount of waste heat in its operation. This waste heat can be harvested and converted into electricity. Hence, this project focuses on harvesting thermal energy non-intrusively from the air conditioning outdoor unit using thermoelectric generator. Thermoelectric generator converts thermal energy into electricity. From the experiment, it was determined that the points with the highest temperatures were on the right side of the front grille of the air conditioning outdoor unit. Then, the thermoelectric generator was mounted using a cable tie on these points. The temperatures of the hot side and the cold side of the thermoelectric generator and the output voltage generated were measured. The data was collected again at different thermostat settings. These steps were also repeated with the heat sink attached to the thermoelectric generator vertically and horizontally. From these experiments, it can be observed that the optimum point to mount the thermoelectric generator was identified as point B which is at 3 o’clock position on the front grille of the air conditioning outdoor unit because it generated the highest value of RMS voltage data which is 3.31 mV without heat sink, 14.80 mV with vertical oriented heat sink and 13.93 mV with horizontal oriented heat sink. It was also determined that the most efficient way for the thermoelectric generator to harvest thermal energy is by attaching a heat sink on the cold side of the thermoelectric generator and the best air conditioning settings for thermal energy harvesting using thermoelectric generator is at thermostat setting of 16 °C. Thus, it is proven that the waste heat generated by the air conditioning outdoor unit can be harvested non-intrusively and in a clean harvesting manner

Design simulation and development of prototype filling nozzle in food industry

This project necessitates the use of simulation to design the filling nozzles for the food industry. Filling nozzles are used for food packaging production and the speed and efficiency are dependent on the filling nozzle design. The current filling nozzle design is only capable of producing a low volume of production due to the design limitation. Therefore, the new design was proposed to solve this problem by improving several components that can be modified based on the density of the food and the volume of the liquid to be filled. Several designs were proposed and simulated using finite element analysis (FEA) to observe the efficiency of the fluid flow behaviour to imitate the filling process. The same properties of coconut milk utilized in the industry were used for the simulation with A DENSITY OF 1014 kg/m3 and a viscosity of 0.00161Pa.s. All proposed designs were evaluated using the Pugh method and the best design with more outflow channels was proposed which appeared can provide higher flow velocity and a smoother flow at the outlet and eventually lead to higher production

Toxicogenomic and Phenotypic Analyses of Bisphenol-A Early-Life Exposure Toxicity in Zebrafish

Bisphenol-A is an important environmental contaminant due to the increased early-life exposure that may pose significant health-risks to various organisms including humans. This study aimed to use zebrafish as a toxicogenomic model to capture transcriptomic and phenotypic changes for inference of signaling pathways, biological processes, physiological systems and identify potential biomarker genes that are affected by early-life exposure to bisphenol-A. Phenotypic analysis using wild-type zebrafish larvae revealed BPA early-life exposure toxicity caused cardiac edema, cranio-facial abnormality, failure of swimbladder inflation and poor tactile response. Fluorescent imaging analysis using three transgenic lines revealed suppressed neuron branching from the spinal cord, abnormal development of neuromast cells, and suppressed vascularization in the abdominal region. Using knowledge-based data mining algorithms, transcriptome analysis suggests that several signaling pathways involving ephrin receptor, clathrin-mediated endocytosis, synaptic long-term potentiation, axonal guidance, vascular endothelial growth factor, integrin and tight junction were deregulated. Physiological systems with related disorders associated with the nervous, cardiovascular, skeletal-muscular, blood and reproductive systems were implicated, hence corroborated with the phenotypic analysis. Further analysis identified a common set of BPA-targeted genes and revealed a plausible mechanism involving disruption of endocrine-regulated genes and processes in known susceptible tissue-organs. The expression of 28 genes were validated in a separate experiment using quantitative real-time PCR and 6 genes, ncl1, apoeb, mdm1, mycl1b, sp4, U1SNRNPBP homolog, were found to be sensitive and robust biomarkers for BPA early-life exposure toxicity. The susceptibility of sp4 to BPA perturbation suggests its role in altering brain development, function and subsequently behavior observed in laboratory animals exposed to BPA during early life, which is a health-risk concern of early life exposure in humans. The present study further established zebrafish as a model for toxicogenomic inference of early-life chemical exposure toxicity

An Exploratory Study on Students’ Electricity Consumption in RCE Gombak For Sustainable Communities

Rising energy demand in Malaysia has become an increasing concern. Malaysia uses more energy to produce a unit of GDP over time; when more energy is needed to create an output of similar value, this impacts the overall cost of production and may contribute to increased environmental degradation. In line with SDG 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities and SDG 12: Responsible Consumption and Production, this study aims to understand the electricity consumption of students and their knowledge of energy efficiency. The study was conducted at Sekolah Berasrama Penuh Integrasi Gombak in the year 2022. A questionnaire was distributed to the students containing questions about basic knowledge of climate change and energy efficiency. The survey also contained questions to gauge the students’ electricity consumption behaviour. Some of the questions were formulated based on Malaysia’s National Energy Efficiency Action Plan 2016-2025. The purpose is to discover to what extent secondary school students are aware of government initiatives to reduce energy consumption

Fault location identification in power transmission networks using novel non-intrusive fault monitoring systems

This paper proposes a novel fault localization method that is based on the non-intrusive fault monitoring (NIFM) techniques in high-voltage/extra-high-voltage (HV/EHV) power transmission networks. In this work, the fault signals measured at the utilities can be extracted by the hyperbolic S-transform (HST). To carefully select coefficients of the HST representing fault transient signals and slash the size of inputs for recognition algorithms, power-spectrumbased HST is adopted in this paper to quantitatively transform the HST coefficients (HSTCs). After the processes of feature selection, the fault location indicator is recognized by the support vector machines (SVMs). To examine and validate the proposed methodology for constructing power transmission networks, various fault types are simulated by using electromagnetic transients program (EMTP). The simulation results are achieved to reveal that the proposed methods demonstrate a high success rate of fault location identification in power transmission networks for NIFM applications

Fault location identification in power transmission networks: using novel nonintrusive fault-monitoring systems

This article proposes a novel fault-localization method that is based on the nonintrusive fault-monitoring (NIFM) techniques in high-voltage/extra-high-voltage (HV/EHV) power transmission networks. In this work, the fault signals measured at the utilities are extracted by the hyperbolic S-transform (HST) before going through the identification process. To carefully select coefficients of the HST representing fault transient signals and reduce the size of inputs for recognition algorithms, power-spectrum-based HST is adopted in this article to quantitatively transform the HST coefficients (HSTCs). After the processes of feature selection, the fault-location indicator is recognized by the support vector machines (SVMs). To examine and validate the proposed methodology, various fault types in a sample power system are simulated by using the electromagnetic transient program (EMTP). The simulation results reveal that the proposed methods demonstrate a high success rate of fault-location identification in power transmission networks for NIFM applications

100gm Pouch Food Holder

Food holder is the tool used in the food manufacturing industry, especially for retort technology for holding the food packaging in the filling line. The unique design of every food packaging size determines the efficiency of the production line. The specific height, slotting dimension and elbow height is the most critical part to ensure the food holder works efficiently

Non-intrusive Energy Harvesting from Vibration of Air Conditioning Condenser Unit Utilizing Piezoelectric Sensors

One of the renewable energies which is potential to be harvested by end users is from harvesting vibration energy. Vibration energy is generated because of operations and movement of machines, equipment, and tools. Vibration in air-conditioning operation is a widespread problem which various researchers have research on. In this work the vibration generated from the air conditioning condenser unit are harvested utilizing piezoelectric in a non-intrusive manner in such a way that the energy are harvested without interruption to the existing air conditioning operation. Piezoelectric sensor is commonly exploited to convert ambient vibration into electricity. Measurements to identify the location to mount the piezoelectric sensors for optimum harvested energy have been performed. The data obtained from the accelerometer and piezoelectric sensors are identical to identify the optimum location to harvest vibration energy. The highest frequency spot located on the condenser unit with 103.97Hz will be the best placement for the piezoelectric sensor to harvest vibration energy. The voltage produced at the best placement is 375.28 mV. The average voltage harvested are at optimum level when the setting of the air conditioning temperature at low temperature and the air conditioning fan speed at high speed

A novel non-intrusive vibration energy harvesting method for air conditioning compressor unit

The purpose of harvesting vibration energy is to obtain clean and sustainable energy by converting vibration energy from ambient sources into a voltage output. In this work, a piezoelectric sensor, PZT-5H is attached to a 3D printed and custom-made mounting to be placed at an air conditioning condenser unit, to harvest vibration energy. The configuration of the harvester is non-intrusive, in which the harvester did not intrude into compressor unit operation. Temperature (20 °C, 22 °C, and 24 °C) and air volume flow rates (3 levels of air volume flow rate at 245 L/second, 274 L/second, and 297 L/second) were taken into consideration in this investigation. An accelerometer was first used to investigate the optimum vibration frequency in Hertz, and six locations were identified. Next, the piezoelectric sensor was mounted at these six locations, and the output root-mean-square (RMS) voltage from the piezoelectric sensor was obtained. The analysis of variance (ANOVA) indicated that temperature and air volume flow rates factors were significant. It was found that the location identified with the highest amount of vibration at 830.2 Hz from accelerometer measurement, was also the highest amount of RMS voltage, at 510.82 mV, harvested by the piezoelectric, from the temperature of 20 °C and air volume flow rates at high level (air flow volume flow rate at 297 L/second). From this work, it is feasible to utilize this novel method of harvesting waste vibration energy from the air conditioning compressor unit