Experimental evaluation of new pipe sleeve with weep holes for concrete leakage prevention

Mortar is a layer with high water absorption rate over concrete due to its porous structure. The mortar layer that frequently exposed to water or moisture is more likely to contain moisture in its layer. The example of area that is mostly exposed to water is the bathroom. The water infiltrated and trapped in the mortar slab in the bathroom will eventually increase the moisture content of the mortar slab and will raise many problems such as the deterioration of the building structure surface. Therefore, this study has been carried out to produce a technology to remove the trapped water in the mortar slab and to reduce the moisture content in the mortar layer. The infiltration rate of the water into the mortar slabs installed with the conventional pipe sleeve (T1), the circular weep-holes pipe sleeve (T2), the vertical weep-holes pipe sleeve (T3) and the inclined weep-holes pipe sleeve (T4) have been measured and the results show that T4 has recorded the highest reading of 7.74 ml/min compared to other pipe sleeves. Besides that, T4 has also recorded the highest water flow rate out of the mortar with 1.31 ml/min and recorded the lowest moisture content of 10.1%. Inclined weep-holes pipe sleeve was proven able to work better than other designs. Therefore, the New Pipe Sleeve (NPS) performance with inclined weep-holes designs are studied in depth by changing the weep-holes angles to 15°, 30°, 45°, 60° and 75° and weep-holes surface area of 6%, 8% and 10%. As a result, the weep-holes angle of 60° with 10% weep-holes surface area has recorded the highest water infiltration rate and water flow rate out of the mortar with 20.898 ml/min and 3.764 ml/min, respectively, obtaining the highest reduction of the moisture content by 3.1%. The optimum performance of the pipe sleeve with inclined weep-holes design has been proposed by using Design Expert Software and the optimum performance can be achieved with the used of the weep-holes angle of 69.55° and 10% weep-holes surface area, producing water infiltration rate of 20.4513 ml/min and water flow rate out of the mortar of 3.3795 ml/min. Therefore, application of optimise design of weep-holes has promising potential method to reduce leakage and fungi problem that normally occurred in bathroom area

Development of Photovoltaic (PV) based Electrical Power Generation

The demand of electricity becomes higher every year and the Ninth Malaysian Plan, it is projected that the need for electricity will increase by 20% in the year 2010. Power generation system in Malaysia is centralized and is based on non-renewable fuels such as coal, diesel, oil and natural gas. The price of natural gas is currently highly volatile and faces the possibility of depletion sooner than projected. In this project, a study is carried out to determine the effectiveness of the current electricity generation, transmission and distribution system

AUTOMATED SCORING FOR SCALINESS OF PSORIASIS LESIONS USING EDGE DETECTION

Skin diseases affect 20-30% of the population at any one time, interfering with activities in 10%. Psoriasis, an Mamniatory skin condition and currently incurable is one of the most common skin diseases. About 80% of people who develop psoriasis have plaque psoriasis, which appears as patches of raised, reddish skiii covered by silvery-white scale. The Psoriasis Area and Severity Index (PASI) is the most widely Used tool to assess psoriasis disease severity in clinical trials, although it can be exceedingly cumbersome for use in daily clinical practice. It is proven to be extremely effective in assessing Psoriasis. When Using the PASI, psoriatic plaques are graded based on three criteria: redness, thickness, and scaliness. For the time being, the PASI-scoring are subjective since the assessments are done Visually by the dermatologist. The assessment will result in inter-individual variation between estimates due to different level of experiences and visual acuity. The aim of this project is to develop an automated scoring for scaliness of Psoriasis lesions program Using MATLAB. This project will be Using 2-D Psoriasis images obtained from General Hospital, Kuala Lumpur and medical database online. The MATLAB software will be Used to develop algorithms that are capable to read images of Psoriasis and grade the scaliness scores using the PASI-score texture analysis. The targeted system will include subsystem for acquiring the images, image processing, segmentation, texture analysis for scaliness score and severity based on PASI system

Factors that influence customer’s purchase intention of organic and healthy food in Kota Bharu / Muhammad Hafizuddin Mat Nawi

The aim of this study was to examine the factors that influence customer’s purchase intention of organic and healthy food in Kota Bharu. There are five (5) independent variables that been studied, which were health consciousness, the attitude, product info and labeling, food safety concern and perceived value. This study also was conduct to examine the underlying factors that might be influence the customer’s intentions to purchase the organic and healthy food products. Moreover, questionnaire had been used in order to get feedback from respondents. Researcher had distributed 120 questionnaires to Binaraya PKINK staffs, Telekom Malaysia Pengkalan Chepa branch staffs, Teachers from Sekolah Kebangsaan Parang Puting and Sekolah Menengah Kebangsaan Kemumin. The sampling is convenient sampling. The method that been use are simple convenient sampling. The data collected was then tested on its frequency and reliability analysis. The correlation analysis was used to test the hypothesis in this study. The finding on reliability was good and it considers that all dependent are acceptable. The findings of this paper suggest five factors are significant for explaining the factors that influence customer’s purchase intention of organic and healthy food in Kota Bharu. Based from the results obtained in this study, researcher suggests some recommendations like make the further research to get more accurate result in the future. It also recommend that make the organic and healthy food awareness among customer and reducing the price will attract more customer purchase intention of organic and healthy foo

FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS OF RESIDUAL STRESSES IN BUTT WELDING JOINT OF ASTM A36 PLATE AND ITS EFFECT ON FATIGUE CRACK GROWTH

Welding is a process to bond and joint materials especially metals for various purpose. Welding has become the method of choice for its strength and efficiency rather than riveting, screwing or bolting. Unfortunately, welding can also affect the structure’s mechanism in the welded material

Development of moment rotation capacity numerical procedure for FRP plated steel section

Fiber Reinforced Polymer (FRP) is a popular subject in retrofitting nowadays. It is always associated with worked on enhancing the performance reinforced concrete and also steel structure. This paper highlights the theoretical works on FRP plated steel beams in terms of debonding failure. The program used to develop the analytical procedure is Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet. The program has been used before is FOTRAN and another program will be develop to study the behavior and performance of FRP plated steel section using spreadsheet. The validation of this study will be based on the parameters adopted from tbe previous study witb addition of the current practice standards. Plated steel section used is 1-beam with the FRP plate is reinforced on the bottom flange of the beam. The procedure will begin from cross section analysis, span analysis before it can be completed with the moment-rotation analysis

The effect of soil moisture retention with amendment of superabsorbent polymer – review paper / Muhammad Alif Hafizuddin Rahmat

The world now is facing the increasing of mean temperature. It was predicted that it keep increasing for another coming years. It is the most a biotic stress factor. These phenomena will affect a lot in agriculture sector as all type of soil will faced a huge problem that is loss moisture content. It will give impact to the growth of crop and their yield. In order faced the problem the usage of superabsorbent polymer as an amendment to the soil in order to improve the soil moisture retention in the soil. Superabsorbent polymer (SAP) is synthetic hydrophilic polymers that are in gel form. It has the ability to hold water or liquid in term of swelling much greater in term of their weight than the initial weight. Superabsorbent polymer has the ability to absorb high volume of water, 30 to 60 times its own volume. This review is to discuss about the effect of soil moisture content when amend by superabsorbent polymer in soil. The result shows that the SAP could improve soil moisture content and soil moisture retention and release it in time in soil and it could give significant impact to the soil although in low dosage especially in sandy type of soil

CHARACTERISTIC OF OVARIAN AND ESTRADIOL CONCENTRATIONS IN THE FOLLICULAR FLUID OF SLAUGHTERED ACEH CATTLE

The objective of this study was to characterize the morphology of ovary from slaughtered Aceh cow and measuring the concentration of estradiol in the follicular fluid to examine the potential utilizing for in-vitro fertilization (IVF) development in Aceh cattle. In total, 30 pairs of ovaries were collected from 30 Aceh cattle slaughtered at Banda Aceh abattoir. Morphological characteristics of ovaries observed were the size of ovaries, weight of ovaries, number of follicles, the diameter of follicles, corpus luteal (CL), and volume of follicular fluid. The follicular fluid was aspirated using a disposable syringe and analyzed the estradiol concentrations using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). The follicles were grouped into 3 categories based on the diameter (Ø) of follicles: small follicles (Ø 1 - 5 mm), medium follicles (Ø 5 - 8 mm), and large follicles (Ø 8 mm). The morphological characteristic of ovaries varied between right and left ovaries in which right ovaries showed bigger size and weight compared to the left ovaries (P0.05), whereas the number of follicles and follicular fluid did not significantly different (P0.05). The concentrations of estradiol in follicular fluid of large and medium follicles were significantly higher compared to small follicles (P0.05), whereas the concentration of estradiol between large and medium follicles, did not significant different (P0.05). In conclusion, the follicles from abattoir can be used as potential oocytes resources to support IVF development for Aceh cattle in the future. The follicular fluid provided from these follicles can be an alternative for in vitro maturation media of oocytes due to containing high estradiol concentrations

ON VOLTERRA AND ORTHOGONALITY PRESERVING QUADRATIC STOCHAISTIC OPERATORS

A quadratic stochastic operator (in short QSO) is usually used to present the time evolution of differing species in biology. Some quadratic stochastic operators have been studied by Lotka and Volterra. In the present paper, we first give a simple characterization of Volterra QSO in terms of absolutely continuity of discrete measures. Moreover, we provide its generalization in continuous setting. Further, we introduce a notion of orthogonal preserving QSO, and describe such kind of operators defined on two dimensional simplex. It turns out that orthogonal preserving QSOs are permutations of Volterra QSO. The associativity of genetic algebras generated by orthogonal preserving QSO is studied to

Adsorption of basic methelene blue (blue 90) dye by calcine and uncalcined ZnAlCO₃ LDH / Muhammad Hafizuddin Bahtiar

Layered Double Hydroxides (LDH) were found to have higher anionic exchange capacity as removal dye contamination from aqueous solution. In this study, ZnAICO₃ was synthesized by using co precipitation method. Different parameters that effect the adsorption process were studied which includes contact time, initial concentration, adsorbent dosage, initial pH and particle size. The result of contact time indicate that the maximum percentage uptake of methelene blue by LDH is 40% was achieve in 180 min and for the effect of initial concentration in 2ppm. The result for adsorbent dosage indicates that the maximum uptake of MB 90 is 42.3% was achieve in 1.5 g of LDH and effect of pH is 30.44% at pH 2. for particle size, the maximum % uptake are 37.8% at 212 um. Those are for uncalcine LDH and for calcine LDH, there are just slightly increase in the percentage uptake about 10 - 20%.Result shown that the adsorption isotherm will fitted only in Langmuir and not for freundlich. The maximum capacity adsorbent of freundlich is 0.11 mg/g lower that langmuir 5.13 mg/g.From the characterization study using FTIR, XRD and FESEM, it confirm that the ZnAICO₃ are the true LDH, and here it confirmed that ZnAlCO₃ calcine and uncalcine was effective removal of MB 90 from aqueous solution