Land use and deforestation modelling of river catchments in Klang Valley Malaysia.

This paper presents analyses of the land use and land cover change of the Langat-Dengkil sub-catchment and the deforestation of the Klang-Langat catchment in the context of water resource availability. The Langat-Dengkil sub-catchment lies within the upper catchment of Klang-Langat. For both catchments, the landsat TM and ETM satellite imageries, ERDAS Imagine 8.4 and ArcView/Arc GIS softwares were used to detect spatial and temporal changes in land use and deforestation between the year 1990 and 2001. For Klang-Langat deforestation, CLUE model was used to forecast change up to year 2020 using two set scenarios. Langat-Dengkil sub-catchments experienced multiple changes of land use and land cover at varying quantum for the years 1990 and 2001. It was found that forest land and agriculture were reduced by 9.5% (4,303 ha) and 17.3% (11,598 ha), respectively. During the same period (1990 to 2001), urbanised land has increased by nearly six folds (18,860 ha). Land use change matrix has indicated that the increase of urbanised area was at the expense of agriculture and forest land. For Klang-Langat catchment, the deforestation for 1989 – 1999 were also serious. About 36,351 ha were deforested including 12,244 ha of Permanent Forest Reserve. Deforestation prone areas are located within 1000 m from major access, 2000 m from town, confined to altitude less than 100 m and within slope of less than 5o. Projection for year 2020 has predicted that if the Permanent Forest Reserve is strictly protected, deforestation will be reduced to 22,340 ha or 22%. Otherwise, it will be heavily deforested at 50,851 ha or 50%. Both results showed that the accelerated land use change and deforestation can only be mitigated through stringent management of land conversion, and as for the forest, it has to be through the total protection by law. This can be achieved by strengthening the Permanent Forest Reserve law and the commitment in adopting sustainable resource policy

A conducting domain surface boundary applied to hybrid FEM-FDTD Electromagnetic Models

A modified boundary surface between the two domains in the hybrid FEM-FDTD technique is presented. This permits a heterogeneous surface to be imposed, allowing selected parts to be represented as being conducting or non-conducting. This enables a reduced surface size to be used in cases where an antenna is above a conducting plane, as well as facilitating a range of other practical scenarios. Examples presented show stable results and good agreement with published data

Finite Element Modelling of Creep Rupture on Grade 91 Steel using Monkman-Grant Ductility based Damage Model

Failure strain is a main parameter used in the ductility exhaustion based damage model in which the accuracy of the prediction is dependent on its input value. The experimental measured has indicated that the value of strain at fracture is extensively scattered, therefore may affect the prediction. This paper presents the result of creep rupture time using a modified creep damage model incorporating Monkman-Grant (MG) failure strain as an alternative to strain at fracture. Both strains at fracture and MG failure strain are separately employed in the damage model to predict the failure time of uniaxial smooth specimen and notched bar with different acuity ratios of 3.0 and 20. The FE model of the specimen is loaded under different stress values and the multiaxial failure strain at each stress level is estimated using Cock and Ashby void growth model. The predicted creep rupture time that is compared to the experimental data (in a range of 40-1000 hours) showing a good agreement within the scatter band of +/- factor of 2. Both approaches using strain at fracture and MG failure strain can be used in predicting the creep failure under uniaxial and multiaxial features. The advantage of using MG strain is that the laboratory creep testing can be interrupted prior to specimen fractured or once the secondary creep deformation occurs. Meanwhile, the determination of strain at fracture needs longer test duration where the test can be stopped only when the specimen broken

Positioning Control of an Antagonistic Pneumatic Muscle Actuated System using Feedforward Compensation with Cascaded Control Scheme

This paper presents a feedforward compensation with cascaded control scheme (FFC) for the positioning control of a vertical antagonistic based pneumatic muscle actuated (PMA) system. Owing to the inherent nonlinearities and time varying parameters exhibited by PMA, conventional fixed controllers unable to demonstrate high positioning performance. Hence, the feedforward compensation with cascaded control scheme is proposed whereby the scheme includes a PID controller coupled with nonlinear control elements. The proposed scheme has a simple control structure in addition to its straightforward design procedures. Though there are nonlinear control elements involved, these elements are derived from the open loop system responses that does not requires any accurate known parameters. Performance of the FFC scheme are then evaluated experimentally and compared to a PID controller with feedforward compensation (FF-PID) in point-to-point motion of different step heights. Overall, the experimental results show that the effectiveness of the proposed FFC scheme in reducing the steady state error to zero in comparison to FF-PID controller for all cases of step heights examined

Interference temperature measurements and spectrum occupancy evaluation in the context of cognitive radio

This paper presents a refined radio spectrum measurement platform specifically designed for spectrum occupancy surveys in the context of Cognitive radio. Cognitive radio permits the opportunistic usage of licensed bands by unlicensed users without causing harmful interference to the licensed user. In this work, a study based on the measurement of the 800 MHz to 2.4 GHz frequency band at two different locations inside Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM), Johor Bahru campus, Malaysia is presented. Two Tektronix RSA306B spectrum analyzer are set up to conduct simultaneous measurements at different locations for a 24 hours period. The analysis conducted in this work is based on the real spectrum data acquired from environment in the experimental set up. Busy and idle channels were identified. The channels subject to adjacent-channel interference were also identified, and the impact of the detection threshold used to detect channel activities was also discussed. The consistency of the observed channel occupation over a range of thresholds and a sudden drop has good characteristics in determining an appropriate threshold needed in order to avoid interference

Ecology of the coastal heath forest flora - a case study from Terengganu, Malaysia

This study was conducted to determine the floral diversity and biomass in a coastal heath forest at Rantau Abang, Terengganu, Malaysia. The plot included contiguously arranged 100 subplots (10 m x 10 m). Results showed that 959 trees of 63 species belonging to 52 genera and 30 families are distributed in this coastal forest. Myrtaceae is the largest family (163 trees) followed by Annonaceae (160 trees) and Lecythidaceae (100 trees). Euphorbiaceae is the most diverse family containing 6 genera and 6 species. Syzygium claviflorum var. claviflorum (15.5%) was the dominant species followed by Polyalthia hypogaea (12.7%) and Barringtonia macrostachya (10.4%). Dipterocarpaceae has a small stocking as compared to the non-dipterocarp families in this forest. This family comprised about 9% of tree density and 6% of tree species diversity. The dominant species from Dipterocarpaceae is Shorea materialis. The total biomass in the forest lies around 249 ton/ha. The largest contribution to the biomass comes from Dipterocarpaceae with 86 ton/ha (34.5%) followed by Myrtaceae 75.3 ton/ha (30.2%). The biomass contribution of Shorea materialis is78.8 ton/ha, followed by Syzygium claviflorum 67.8 ton/ha. The biomass of Champereia griffithii is 0.006 ton/ha

Business intelligence readiness factors for higher education institution

Higher Education Institution (HEI) have embarked on the new style of decision-making with the aim to enhance the speed and reliability of decision-making capabilities. One of the hardest challenges in implementing Business Intelligence (BI) is the organization’s readiness towards adopting and implementing BI systems. Currently, few published studies have examined BI readiness in HEI environment. Seeing this challenge, this study aims to contribute in determining the BI readiness factors in HEI specifically in the deployment strategies. Through inductive attention to BI in HEI environment, three broad factors have been identified: a) Organizational – that concerning on business strategies, process and structure, b) Technology – involves the BI system and knowledge for managing including the sources and c) Social – the culture within organization that may influence decision-making and its processes. This paper also makes recommendations for future research

Proving Termination Starting from the End

We present a novel technique for proving program termination which introduces a new dimension of modularity. Existing techniques use the program to incrementally construct a termination proof. While the proof keeps changing, the program remains the same. Our technique goes a step further. We show how to use the current partial proof to partition the transition relation into those behaviors known to be terminating from the current proof, and those whose status (terminating or not) is not known yet. This partition enables a new and unexplored dimension of incremental reasoning on the program side. In addition, we show that our approach naturally applies to conditional termination which searches for a precondition ensuring termination. We further report on a prototype implementation that advances the state-of-the-art on the grounds of termination and conditional termination.Comment: 16 page

Fate of Chemical Activators in the Aqueous Environment: What Should We Do About IT?

The commonly used activators in chemical activation of activated carbon are very toxic and poisonous to the aquatic environment. Finding trade-off solutions without compromising the quality of activated carbon and jeopardizing the environment have become the subject of considerable interest. This paper is aimed to shed some light on the inevitable release of chemical activators to the aqueous environment, and offers some possible solutions to overcome the emergence of secondary pollution

Complexity Bounds for Ordinal-Based Termination

`What more than its truth do we know if we have a proof of a theorem in a given formal system?' We examine Kreisel's question in the particular context of program termination proofs, with an eye to deriving complexity bounds on program running times. Our main tool for this are length function theorems, which provide complexity bounds on the use of well quasi orders. We illustrate how to prove such theorems in the simple yet until now untreated case of ordinals. We show how to apply this new theorem to derive complexity bounds on programs when they are proven to terminate thanks to a ranking function into some ordinal.Comment: Invited talk at the 8th International Workshop on Reachability Problems (RP 2014, 22-24 September 2014, Oxford