Conductivity Study on Plasticized Solid bio-electrolytes CMC-NH4Br and Application in Solid-state Proton Batteries

This paper present the development of plasticized solid bio-electrolytes (PSBs) which has been accomplished by incorporating various composition of plasticizer namely ethylene carbonate (EC) with carboxy methylcellulose doped NH4Br via solution casting method. The plasticized polymer–salt ionic conduction of PSBs has been analyzed by electrical impedance spectroscopy. Plasticization using EC in PSBs system assists the enhancement of NH4Br dissociation and therefore increases the protonation process in the system. The highest ionic conductivity obtained for CMC−NH4Br containing with 25 wt. % NH4Br was achieved at 1.12 x 10-4 Scm-1 and improved to 3.31 x 10-3 Scm-1 when EC was added in PSBs system. The ionic conductivity-temperature for PSBs system was found to obey the Arrhenius relationships where the ionic conductivity increases with temperature. The solid-state proton batteries were assembled with the formation of Zn + ZnSO4.7H2O || highest conducting PSBs system || MnO2 and achieve with a maximum open circuit voltage (OCV) of 1.48 V at room temperature and showed good in rechargeablity performance with more than 10 cycles

Layer by Layer Composite Membranes of Alginate-Chitosan Crosslinked by Glutaraldehyde in Pervaporation Dehydration of Ethanol

Hydrophilicity of membrane causing only water can pass through membrane. Pervaporation process using organophilic membrane has been offered as alternative for ethanol dehydration. This paper investigate pervaporation based biopolymer composite membrane from alginate-chitosan using layer by layer method prepared by glutaraldehyde as crosslinking agent and polyethersulfone (PES) as supported membrane. Characterization of crosslinked of composite membrane by FTIR helped in identification of sites for interaction between layers of membrane and support layer (PES). The SEM showed a multilayer structure and a distinct interface between the chitosan layer, the sodium alginate layer and the support layer. The coating sequence of membranes had an obvious influence on the pervaporation dehydration performance of membranes. For the dehydration of 95 wt% ethanol-water mixtures, a good performance of PES-chitosan-alginate-chitosan (PES/Chi/Alg/Chi) composite membrane was found in the pervaporation dehydration of ethanol. Article History: Received April 12nd , 2016; Received in revised form June 25th , 2016; Accepted July 1st , 2016; Available online How to Cite This Article: Rokhati, N., Istirokhatun, T. and Samsudin, A.M. (2016) Layer by Layer Composite Membranes of Alginate-Chitosan Crosslinked by Glutaraldehyde in Pervaporation Dehydration of Ethanol. Int. Journal of Renewable Energy Development, 5(2), 101-106. http://dx.doi.org/10.14710/ijred.5.2.101-10

An In Vivo Study Of A Locally-Manufactured Hydroxyapatite -Based Material As Bone Replacement Material.

Synthetic HA has excellent biocompatibility, but it has limited application due to its low toughness and flexural strength. In order to improve the mechanical properties (impact resistance, and tensile strength), metals and other elements were added to HA

A Comparative Study of Enhanced Nonlinear PI to Multivariable Nonlinear Plant

The static gains of PI controller have limitation to handle the process nonlinearities of the system. This suggests the development of enhanced nonlinear PI controller where a nonlinear gain function is cascaded to PI parameters. Two nonlinear gain functions are developed and the effectiveness of the control performance is investigated for two different control structures for a multivariable nonlinear wastewater treatment plant (WWTP). It was proved that superior output with the lower mean error was obtained by developed nonlinear PI specifically in the multivariable control structure. The developed nonlinear PI offers simpler control structure and easy implementation hence offering alternative control strategy for the multivariable system

Effects of Dietary Oil Supplementation with Different Fatty Acid Profiles on Rumen Fibre Degrading Bacteria Population in Goats

Effects of dietary oil supplementation on the predominant rumen fibre-degrading bacteria population were investigated. In this experiment, rumen fibre-degrading bacteria population were evaluated on 16 fistulated male goats that were randomly assigned to four treatment groups: T1: control/basal diet (CNT); T2: basal diet + olive oil (OL); T3: basal diet + palm olein oil (PO); and T4: basal diet + sunflower oil (SF). The oil content was supplemented at 6% of DM bases. Rumen content was collected from each individual animal and the DNA was extracted accordingly. The number of rumen fibre-degrading bacteria was enumerated via real-time PCR method. Significant difference (P0.05) were observed for Ruminococcus albus in supplemented diet as compared to T1. The other two fibre-degrading bacteria, Fibrobacter succinogenes and R. flavefaciens were not highly affected by the supplementation of the dietary oils. This study has demonstrated that supplementation of dietary oils with differing fatty acid components has no impact on the predominant rumen fibre-degrading bacteria which benefit the animals by providing extra energy from the dietary oil supplementation without compromising the ability of rumen fibre digestion process

Forecasting of monthly marine fish landings using artificial neural network

Management of marine resources have gradually become more important during these past years because of the increased awareness of these resources becoming limited. Forecasting of fish landings is one of the many ways that can contribute to a better decision making for fisheries management. Being a renowned forecasting model, artificial neural network with back propagation was selected for this research with enhancement made by pre-processing the data using empirical mode decomposition. The monthly marine landings data of East Johor and Pahang which has 144 observations each, was gathered from the Department of Fisheries Malaysia website. A ratio of 92:8 was used to divide the data into training and testing sets. Data pre-processing was done in R software whereas the forecasting models were developed in MATLAB software. Results from the proposed model are then compared to a conventional artificial neural network using the root-mean-square error and mean absolute error values, wherein it was shown that the proposed model could outperform the conventional model

Effect EMIMCl on electrochemical properties based PMMA-PLA hybrid gel polymer electrolyte

The formulation of a hybrid gel polymer electrolyte (HGPE) system comprising of polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) and polylactic acid (PLA) as a hybrid host polymer doped with lithium bis(trifluoromethanesulfonyl)imide (LiTFSI) has been successfully prepared in this study with the introduction of an ionic liquid, namely 1-Ethyl-3-methylimidazolium chloride (EMIMCl). Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction (XRD) were used to investigate the structural features of HGPEs. The FTIR analysis revealed that the complexation changes the peak intensity at region C = O stretching, CH2 bending, and C-O stretching. Meanwhile, XRD showed that the addition of EMIMCl altered the HGPE properties and formed an amorphous structure. The prepared HGPE sample was examined for ionic conduction properties through electrical impedance spectroscopy (EIS). It shows that by adding an EMIMCl to the PMMA-PLA-LiTFSI HGPE has decreased the activation energy (Ea) and increased the ionic conductivity. The sample containing 15 wt.% has the lowest Ea value of 0.057 eV and the highest ionic conductivity at room temperature of 3.20 10−3 S cm−1. The temperature dependence was studied in the temperature range from 303 K to 393 K, the HGPE systems were found to follow Arrhenius behavior. The effect of EMIMCl content had decreased the viscosity of HGPEs which led to the gel-like type behavior. The potential windows stability analysis revealed that the highest conducting sample was electrochemically stable up to 3.3 V versus Li/Li+, thus showing that the present electrolytes are promising to be applied as in Li-ions battery

Comparison between MEMD-LSSVM and MEMD-ARIMA in forecasting exchange rate

Due to the non-stationary and non-linearity behaviors of exchange rate data, an appropriate forecasting model that can capture these behaviors is crucial. This paper comparing the performance of modified empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) named as MEMD-ARIMA and modified empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and least squares support vector machine (LSSVM) named as MEMD-LSSVM in forecasting daily USD/TWD exchange rate. EMD technique is firstly used to decompose the exchange rate data that resulting in few intrinsic mode function (IMF) and one residual. In order to improve the result of the EMD so that more effective input can be provided to the forecasting models which are LSSVM and ARIMA, they are clustered into several groups via permutation distribution clustering (PDC). The successfulness of LSSVM in forecasting is depending on the input number selection. The problem is the input number selection is not based on any theories or techniques. Therefore, partial autocorrelation function (PACF) is used in this paper in determining the best number of input for LSSVM. This paper finds that the implementations of PDC has improved the performance of EMD-LSSVM and EMD-ARIMA and also suggest the PDC is suitable either for linear or non-linear model

Carbonized rice husk and cocopeat as alternative media bed for aquaponic system

The study evaluates the suitability of carbonized rice husk and cocopeat substrates as alternative media bed in aquaponics unit for cultivation of red Nile tilapia and Gynura procumbens. Area occupied by the aquaponics unit is about 4.5 m2 and it was operated under equatorial climate conditions. Various substrates namely lightweight expanded clay aggregate (LECA), cocopeat, carbonized rice husk and a mixture of cocopeat-rice husk at ratio 1:1 were prepared using polybags for growing of the longevity spinach. The resultant effects from fish cultivation and plants growth on the water qualities and nitrification efficiency of the aquaponics unit were reported. The aquaponics unit were operated for twelve weeks and the values of pH, temperature, and dissolved oxygen level were measured to be within the range of 6.4-6.9, 27.7-29oC, and 5.5-7 mg·L-1, respectively. Survival rate for fish was 98% with specific growth rate (SGR) and food conversion ratio (FCR) of 6.9% per day and 1.13, respectively. Nutrient deficiency was not evident and plants showed healthy growth with harvest yield ranging between 3.6 and 3.9 kg·m-2. Results attained signified the suitability of utilizing carbonized rice husk and cocopeat as alternatives media bed compared to commercial media bed such as LECA