Screen-printed ceramic based MEMS piezoelectric cantilever for harvesting energy

Screen-printing technology provides a convenient method in fabricating thick-film conductive circuits and devices in the past few decades. Conventionally, piezoelectric thick-film is printed on alumina substrate with high mechanical Q-factor and resonates at higher frequency outside the range of ambient vibration. As the piezoelectric charge generation is proportional to the mechanical stress on the material, therefore the substrate can be removed in order to lower the natural frequency of the structure. In this paper, a series of piezoelectric ceramic cantilevers were fabricated in the form of free-standing cantilever. An additional layer of ceramic was also introduced to the upper and lower electrode to prevent delamination. The issue of zero resultant stress for the sandwiched piezoelectric cantilever was solved by repeating the electrode-PZT-electrode layer to form a multilayer structure. It was found from the experiment that an electrical output power of 32 μW was generated when it operates at its resonant frequency at 403 Hz

Entrepreneurial Potential: An Exploratory Study Of A Community In Johor

Two frequently cited personal traits associated with entrepreneurial potential are internal locus of control and innovativeness. This paper hypothesizes that internal locus of control and innovativeness is sufficient to explain entrepreneurial potential. This hypothesis was tested on a set of 124 responses to a survey did to a community in Johor. Eighteen items in the survey instrument were used to construct scales for innovativeness and locus of control. Items for the innovativeness scale were adapted from the Jackson Personality Inventory while items used for the locus of control scale were adapted from Rotter’s I-E scale. The results found an increased likelihood of an internal locus of control and innovativeness that support entrepreneurial orientation. To be motivated to act, potential entrepreneurs must perceive themselves as capable and psychologically equipped to face the challenges. This work has been supported by Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka (UTeM) and Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia. Keywords: Entrepreneurial Potential, Locus of Control, Innovativeness,Communit

A New Hybrid Embedding Method in Iris Biometric System

The challenging part in achieving high security biometrics data is viewed from the engineering perspective which includes security, accuracy, speeds and application size. The objective of this paper is to increase the accuracy through an embedding technique. A combination of modified pixel value differencing and wavelet decomposition techniques were used in this study. The pixels were scanned in a new direction embedded with the wavelet difference matrix. The system is developed using both eyes and each eye is enrolled with 10 snaps. The embedding process creates the embedded iris feature and the reverse process of embedding is known as de-embedding. Two thousands iris from CASIA database are used. The application is developed using MATLAB and executed for 5-20 iterations. The new hybrid system shows better performance in accuracy in terms of False Acceptance Rate (FAR), embedding capacity and Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) values as benchmarked with the existing method. The finding shows that the output of the embedding capacity is 743801 and 41.10dB of PSNR. The good PSNR value is between 40-50 dB. The implication of this study contributes to a higher accuracy in iris biometric security. Future work should focus on the genetic algorithm to recognize human iris in biometric system

The effect of chitosan content to physical and degradation properties of biodegradable urea fertilizer

Chitosan has been widely used in many applications due to its biodegradability and non-toxicity. This article discusses the effect of different chitosan loadings on properties of ureafertilizer which prepared through direct wet mixing process. Absorption and soil degradationtests were performed to measure the amount of water intakes and the life-cycle of the fertilizer.The chemical interaction and thermal properties were analyzed using FTIR and DSC,respectively. It was found that water absorbency and degradation rate increases with chitosanloading, and FTIR confirms the presence of urea in as-produced fertilizers from a unique –NHand amide C=O functional groups

A qualitative content analysis of e-strategies for Research, Innovation and Commercialization: A case of global bodies,Malaysian ministries and Research university.

Research, Innovation and Commercialization (R, I & C) are now widely accepted as critical tools to improve economy, eradicate poverty,and enhance human development. However, in a developing country like Malaysia, commercialization effort to date is quite modest with low number of research and innovation output from Malaysian universities on a national and international scale. Nowadays, communication and information are transmitted through Internet resources which acts as marketing tools for research,innovation, and commercialization to the global community. Recognizing these potentials, electronic strategies (e-strategies) encompassing R, I & C are on the rise across Asia. This chapter aims to analyze the trend of e-strategies in R, I & C of the global bodies, Malaysian Ministries and research university in Malaysia using a qualitative content analysis. The framework is based on the extant literature and consists of the dynamic cycle of Web resources namely the Web content, interactivity, navigation links, design infrastructures, assessment, and continous quality improvement (CQI). While the WIPO embraces and blends well with the potential advantages of e-strategies, the Scopus lacks few features about the organization and international networking,assessment, and CQI. The Ministries and the university are yet to adequately reflect truly comprehensive and integrated strategies for harnessing and exploiting these potentials in order to gear for internationalization and collaboration across countries