Evaluation of pharmaceutical cream production debottlenecking schemes

The main objective of this work is to model and debottleneck a pharmaceutical production of an anti-allergic cream. The base case process has a minimum cycle time of 29 hours which is equivalent to 66 batches/year. Four schemes were proposed for process debottlenecking due to the anticipated increase of the product demand of 150% in the market. By carrying out throughput analysis study, schemes that fulfil the debottlenecking objective were determined. Out of the four debottlenecking schemes, Scheme 4 was chosen, which proposed a new blending tank and intermediate tank, showed a production increase of over 150%

Vehicle Speed Measurement and Number Plate Detection using Real Time Embedded System

A real time system is proposed to detect moving vehicles that violate the speed limit. A dedicated digital signal processing chip is used to exploit computationally inexpensive image-processing techniques over the video sequence captured from the fixed position video camera for estimating the speed of the moving vehicles. The moving vehicles are detected by analysing the binary image sequences that are constructed from the captured frames by employing the inter-frame difference or the background subtraction techniques. The detected moving vehicles are tracked to estimate their speeds.This project deals with the tracking and following of single object in a sequence of frames and the velocity of the object is determined. The proposed method varies from previous existing methods in tracking moving objects, velocity determination and number plate detection. From the binary image generated, the moving vehicle is tracked using image segmentation of the video frames. The segmentation process is done by using the thresholding and morphological operations on the video frames. The object is visualized and its centroid is calculated. The distance it moved between frame to frame is stored and using this velocity is calculated with the frame rate of video.The images of the speeding vehicles are further analysed to detect license plate image regions. The entire simulation is done in matlab and simulink simulation software. Keywords:morphological;thresholding;segmentation;centroi

Comparative study of natural and artificial wind for thermal comfort studies

Wind speed is widely known factor affecting human thermal perception and comfort. However, little is available about the dynamic characteristics of natural and artificial wind. Currently, some investigators addressed the dynamic aspect of natural and artificial wind speed for thermal comfort according to power spectrum slope. However, there is little information about the dynamic characteristics of wind direction (wind azimuth) and elevation. The aim of this study is to investigate some of the characteristics of natural versus artificial wind at various sampling time. Measurements of natural and artificial wind were made using ultrasonic anemometer. The study location is Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia. Wind speed, wind direction, wind elevation and air temperature are the recorded parameters. In the present case study, the artificial wind is referred to the indoor wind generated by air conditioning and USB fan simultaneously. Several differences were observed between natural and artificial wind at various sampling time. The power spectral slopes of natural wind speed, wind direction, wind elevation and air temperature were higher than the case of artificial wind

Process modelling of a PVC production plant

This paper presents the modelling of a Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) resins manufacturing process with batch process simulator, SuperPro Designer V6.0. The simulation model has been developed based on the operating condition of a local PVC manufacturing plant. As the polymerisation process is carried out in batch operation mode, efforts have been made to document the scheduling details of each unit operation and results are presented in the Gantt chart. Cycle time for a complete polymerisation process is determined to be 14.28 hours. The model also reveals that approximately 17 batches of polymerisation reaction can be processed per day, which tallies the real operation of the PVC manufacturing plant

Investigation on the Dynamic Characteristics Of Natural Wind For Thermal Comfort Studies.

The main purpose of this article is to investigate the dynamic characteristics of natural wind for thermal comfort studies. A primary and secondary data were used. For the primary data, field study was conducted at the Universiti Malaysia Sabah, East Malaysia. The measurements were made under a tree. The site location of the collected secondary data is at Tracy. The site is flat and windy. Wind data of both case studies were recorded using ultrasonic anemometers. The wind speed data were analysed by using descriptive statistics, Weibull distribution and the power spectral analysis. Turbulence intensity was also included. The assessment of rapid increasing wind speed was also addressed in this study. A new method was developed to assess the rapid increasing wind speed for thermal comfort research studies. A comparison was made between both case studies

A chimney of low height to diameter ratio for solar crops dryer

Sabah, Malaysia is rich with solar energy where the daily mean daylight is the for is available for 4–8h. The sunlight can be used effectively in a suitable solar crops drying system. Solar crops dryer with mechanical system is an efficient and suitable option for crops drying. Mechanical system can be replaced with a modified chimney and a conceptual design is proposed. Previously, in the laboratory, a number of experiments had been conducted by using conventional chimney and modified chimney with four different heat loads varied from 1 to 2.5kW and also for different chimney heights varying from 0.3 to 1.2m as well as three different types of chimney model with face areas of 0.56, 1.00, and 2.25m2. It had been found that the modified chimney significantly reduced the effect of flow reversal or cold inflow and restored the loss in flow rate. The current study using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) managed to show draft enhancement by the modified chimney and revealed the pressure prior to exit to be higher than ambient compared with the lower pressure in normal chimney, indicating vulnerability of normal chimneys to flow reversal but positive prevention in a modified chimney

Field Study for Prediction and Evaluation of Thermal Comfort in Residential Buildings in the Equatorial Hot-Humid Climate of Malaysia

An extensive field study has been carried out in non-air-conditioned residences in Kota Kinabalu city, in Malaysia for the prediction and evaluation of the effect of the indoor thermal environment on occupants' thermal comfort. A total of 890 responses over one year were gathered. The hot-humid indoor climates of the surveyed buildings have been described and analyzed in terms of air temperature, globe temperature, relative humidity, wind velocity. The clothing insulation ensemble and metabolic rate of the occupants were also characterized. In the aim to assess the comfort temperature in residential buildings in the hot-humid tropics, each analyzed variable was thoroughly compared with the results of two field studies located in the hot-humid tropics, one conducted in Jakarta by Feriadi and Wong [1] and the second in Singapore by de Dear et al. [2]. Multiple and stepwise regressions were applied for the selection of the independent variable for neutral temperature prediction. Air temperature was chosen as an index for the indoor thermal comfort. The comfort temperature was determined using various approaches. The predicted temperature was found to be nearly 30 °C regardless of the adopted approach. The indoor comfort temperature was close to the recorded mean indoor air temperature of all responses having a difference of about 0.7 °C. The mean and the recorded indoor range temperatures seem to have effect in the prediction of comfort temperature