Landfill leachate treatment using copas

Human activities always generate solid wastes. Solid wastes is usually handled by processes such as, collection, transportation, sorting, recycling and disposal at dumping sites. As a result, the dumping sites become concentrated with wastes and may affect the environment. Most dumping sites generate landfill leachate which could pollute the water body nearby. Examples of chemical characteristic of leachate is shown in Table 1. It includes heavy metals such as cadmium (Cd) and lead (Pb) (Fadil, 1994 and Norhayati et al., 1994). As shown by some reports, heavy metal can be removed by activated carbon (Reed, et al.,1995). Activated carbon also can reduce COD and metals from landfill leachate (Salim, 1992). By using the concept of activated carbon adsorption, some agricultural base materials were studied for their ability to remove heavy metals from water samples (Fadil et al., 1994). It is the intention of this paper to present a report on the ability of carbon which was made of oil palm shell to be used for heavy metal removal from water and landfill leachate samples

MOPAS for metal removal

MOPAS for metal remova

Automated Bus Crew Rescheduling for Late for Sign-On (LFSO) Event using Multi-Agent System

Unpredictable events (UE) are major factors that cause crew rescheduling to be performed. One of the UE is when a crew is late for duty. In this research, it is termed as Late for Sign-On (LFSO). When LFSO occurred, the reschedule is needed to make sure available crew take the duty. Currently, there is no automated mechanism to handle the LFSO. Real time rescheduling approaches mostly are not supported due to static schedules constraint. Mathematical approaches require extensive computational power therefore delayed the real-time results. Meanwhile, manual rescheduling is prone to error and not optimum. This research objective is to develop a new approach in automating the crew rescheduling process using multiagent system. The agents dynamically adapt their behaviour to changing environments quickly and find solutions via negotiations and cooperation between them. Experiment is conducted using AgentPower simulation tool. The result concluded that the proposed technique is capable to reschedule quickly. The distribution of a duty also plays a major role in achieving rescheduling success

On Crowd Density Estimation for Surveillance

The goal of this work is to use computer vision to measure crowd density in outdoor scenes. Crowd density estimation is an important task in crowd monitoring. The assessment is carried out using images of a graduation scene which illustrated variation of illumination due to textured brick surface, clothing and changes of weather. Image features were extracted using grey level dependency matrix, Minkowski fractal dimension and a new method called translation invariant orthonormal Chebyshev moments. The features were then classified into a range of density by using a self organizing map. Three different techniques were used and a comparison on the classification results investigates the best performance for measuring crowd density by visio

Cathodic stripping voltammetry of copper-complexed reactive dyes at a hanging mercury drop electrode : reactive violet 5

Reactive Violet 5 and its hydrolysis product, which is produced as a side product in the dyeing process, can be determined in an admixture at sub-ppb levels by cathodic stripping voltammetry because the potentials of their azo reduction peaks are separated sufficiently. For both dyes, at intermediate pH values the azo peak is preceded by a complexed -copper reduction peak at a less negative potential, which aids the identification of the dyes. The use of pH 6 EDTA buffer removes the complexed-copper peak, as does the use of an acidic buffer (pH < 3). This unusual use of EDTA as a pH buffer facilitates the determination of mixtures of the dye and its hydrolysis product

Photocatalytic activity and reusability of ZnO layer synthesised by electrolysis, hydrogen peroxide and heat treatment

ABSTRACT: In this study, the zinc oxide (ZnO) layer was synthesised on the surface of Zn plates by three different techniques, i.e. electrolysis, hydrogen peroxide and heat treatment. The synthesised ZnO layers were characterised using scanning electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction, UV–visible diffuse reflectance and photoluminescence spectroscopy. The photocatalytic activity of the ZnO layer was further assessed against methylene blue (MB) degradation under UV irradiation. The photocatalytic degradation of MB was achieved up to 84%, 79% and 65% within 1 h for ZnO layers synthesised by electrolysis, heat and hydrogen peroxide treatment, respectively. The reusability results show that electrolysis and heat-treated ZnO layers have considerable photocatalytic stability. Furthermore, the results confirmed that the photocatalytic efficiency of ZnO was directly associated with the thickness and enlarged surface area of the layer. Finally, this study proved that the ZnO layers synthesised by electrolysis and heat treatment had shown better operational stability and reusability