Hydrothermal Liquefaction of Lignocellulosic Biomass

The introduction of a bio-refinery approach in producing bio-chemicals represents a potential opportunity to cover the increased demand for fine chemicals and reduce the societal dependence on fossil sources for petrochemicals. Valorisation of lignocellulosic material for the production of renewable chemicals has attracted much attention as such chemicals could significantly improve the economics of bio-refineries. The present work has investigated the conversion of brewer's spent grain (BSG), a raw material in the form of food industry wastes into value-added chemical and biofuels. BSG represent around 85% of the total by- products generated from the brewing industry and is available in large quantities throughout the year; however its primary application has been limited to animal feed. Despite this, due to its chemical composition, it has value as lignocellulosic rich material. In this thesis, raw BSG has undergone physical and chemical characterisation to determine the composition and selection of appropriate technologies for their utilisation. BSG contains a high moisture content (approx. 75 wt. %). As a consequence, any application towards utilisation of this waste needs to consider the best way to handle their moisture content. Hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL) is the thermochemical conversion of biomass by processing in a hot, pressurised water environment for sufficient time to break down the solid biopolymeric structure to predominantly liquid components. The potential of HTL to break down the lignocellulosic compounds was demonstrated by using both biomass model components (cellulose and lignin) and real biomass, BSG. However, due to the complex composition of real biomass, the product distribution obtained from BSG HTL is significantly different when compared to the biomass model. The most favourable processing condition identified based on both model and real biomass systems were found to be 250 oC, 30 min reaction time and 80 barg. Further investigation on HTL shows, with the addition of methanol, ethanol and 2-propanol in direct liquefaction reaction, the conversion and water-soluble oil (WSO) yield increased significantly compared to the pure water system. The best conversion was obtained by a methanol-water solvent system at 82%, while 2-propanol-water system produces the highest WSO yield at 29%. Moreover, BSG biochar also shows a potential to be used directly as solid fuel without the need for significant modifications

QADHA’ PUASA TATHAWWU’ (SUNNAH) STUDI KOMPARATIF MENURUT IMAM ABU HANIFAH DAN IMAM AL-SYAFI’I

Dalam penulisan skripsi ini dilatarbelakangi oleh dua orang tokoh yang berpengaruh yaitu Imam Abu Hanifah dan Imam Al-Syafi’i yang mempunyai pandangan yang berbeda mengenai hukum qadha’ puasa tathawwu’ (sunnah). Penulis mengambil pokok permasalahan sebagai berikut:Pertama, bagaimana pendapat Imam Abu Hanifah dan Imam Al-Syafi’i mengenai hukum qadha’ puasa tathawwu’ (sunnah). Kedua, bagaimana dalil yang digunakan Imam Abu Hanifah dan Imam Al-Syafi’I mengenai hukum qadha’ puasa tathawwu’(sunnah) dan cara mereka mengistinbatkan hukum. Ketiga, bagaimana analisa fiqh muqaranah terhadap pendapat Imam Abu Hanifah dan Imam Syafi’i mengenai hukum qadha’ puasa tathawwu’ (sunnah). Jenis penelitian ini adalah penelitian hukum Islam normatif yang dilakukan dengan menggunakan library research, yaitu dengan mengambil dan membaca serta menelaah literatur-literatur yang berhubungan dengan penelitian ini. Sumber data yang penulis gunakan adalah sumber data primer yang terdiri dari bahan hukum primer, bahan hukum skunder dan bahan hukum tersier. Bahan hukum primer yang penulis gunakan adalah sebagai rujukan utama ialah kitab alMabsuth karya Imam Sarkhasi dan kitab al-Umm karya Imam Syafi’i. Bahan hukum skunder ialah buku-buku atau literatur-literatur yang berkait tentang masalah yang diteliti. Bahan hukum tersier adalah kamus bahasa Arab dan alQuran. Pendekatan yang penulis gunakan adalah penulisan ini adalah dengan menelaah konsep-konsep atau teori-teori yang dikemukakan oleh Imam Abu Hanifah dan Imam Al-Syafi’i, seterusnya menggunakan pendekatan perbandingan hukum, yaitu denga membandingkan pendapat Imam Abu Hanifah dan Imam AlSyafi’i mengenai hukum qadha’ puasa tathawwu’ (sunnah). Hasil kajian mendapatkan bahwa dalam masalah hukum qadha’ puasa tathawwu’ (sunnah) ini kedua tokoh tersebut sama-sama teguh dengan argument masing-masing. Mereka menggunakan dalil Al-Quran yang sama dalam Surah Muhammad ayat 33 dan hadits yang berbeda dengan menggunakan metode yang berbeda. Di sini, Imam Abu Hanifah berpendapat bahwa hukum qadha’puasa tathawwu’ (sunnah) perlu diqadha apabila dibatalkan. Beliau memahami dalil tersebut secara umum. Alasannya, berdasarkan dalil yang digunakan dalam ayat alquran yang difahami secara umum apabila telah melaksanakan perlu disempurnakan. Kemudian dalil hadits yang digunakan Imam Abu Hanifah berpendapat bahwa hukum qadha’ puasa tathawwu’(sunnah) itu perlu diqadha’ karena ia berpendapat Rasulullah menyuruh Aisyah dan Hafshah mengqadha’ puasa sunnah yang mereka batalkan. Hadits ini yang diriwayatkan oleh Tirmidzi. Sedangkan Imam Al-Syafi’i berpendapat bahwa hukum qadha’ puasa tathawwu’ (sunnah) disunnahkan untuk mengqadha’nya. Karena dalil dalam ayat alquran secara khusus dan hadits yang digunakan Imam Syafi’i bahwa hukum qadha’ puasa tathawwu’ (sunnah) itu disunnahkan, hal ini didasarkan atas hadits Rasulullah tentang orang yang berpuasa disunnahkan untuk mengqadha’kan puasa sunnah. Hadits ini juga diriwayatkan oleh Muslim. Seterusnya untuk permasalahan tentang hukum qadha’ puasa tathawwu’ (sunnah) penulis mendukung argumentasi dari Imam Al-Syafi’i. Bahwa hukum qadha’ puasa tathawwu’ (sunnah) apabila dibatalkan ia disunnahkan untuk mengqadha’nya. Di sini, penulis juga menggunakan kaidah “Ta’arudh Adillah” dengan menyelesaikan dengan kaedah “Tarjih” (dalil syar’i yang tidak mungkin untuk dikompromikan).Setelah dikaji dan diteliti, maka ilmu indikasi penulis lebih cenderung memilih untuk menggunakan pendapat Imam Al-Syafi’i

Good Faith in Construction Contract: A Common Law Perspective

The good faith principle requires contracting parties to be honest as well as considering their contracting partners in performing their contractual duties. In the event, contract clauses are insufficient to protect the interests of the innocent party in a breached contract, the said innocent party may rely on the good faith principle to ensure the fair. However, applying good faith principles to construction contracts is a difficult task. By nature, construction contracts are unique due to the fact that parties (Client and Contractor) are presumed competent to carry out their parts of the contractual obligations. Controversially, the construction contract is often unfairly prejudicial as the Client would customarily have the upper hand in deciding the terms and conditions of a contract. It is the objective of the research to examine the relevancy of application of good faith principle in construction contracts by employing qualitative content analysis. This study adopts a qualitative research approach, mainly employing library and internet resources with the intention to explore relevant legislation, textbooks, journals, research papers and articles. The comparative approach in this paper used content analysis from primary and secondary legal resources of different jurisdictions in the United Kingdom, Malaysia and Australia to compare the application of the good faith principle in the context of construction contracts.  The findings of the research reveals that the adoption and application of the good faith principle in construction contracts is of limited usage even though it is widely used in general contract law of United Kingdom, Malaysia and Australia. This article contributes to the knowledge of the good faith principle in construction contracts, particularly with standard form contracts, by highlighting the importance of the good faith principle in achieving a fairer functioning of construction contracts in its application.  

Legal issues of the law regarding the Malaysian citizenship: a comparative study with the United States of America. / Nur' Atiqah Nasir … [et al.]

This project involves discovering the weaknesses and loopholes in the Malaysian citizenship. The goal is to show that citizenship matters in Malaysia have weaknesses and loopholes regarding the procedure and substantive matters. This has been done by examining the existing laws and rules regarding citizenship in Malaysia and comparing it with the way the law operates in the United States of America and other countries. We also use interviews in written form to validate our research. We use books, journals, legal articles and related acts as our primary sources to strengthen our dissertation. By identifying the problems that arises from the weaknesses and loopholes in the procedural and substantial complications, we will help to improve the citizenship law in Malaysia. This will allow the law to be more efficient both in theoretical and practical ways

Hydrothermal Liquefaction Of An Industrial Biomass Waste: Brewer’s Spent Grain (Bsg)

This research examines the use of hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL) process for a treatment of biomass industrial waste. Brewer’s spent grain (BSG) is a source of lignocellulose that has a potential to be used for chemicals and fuels production, thereby reducing the reliance on fossil sources. There are relatively few investigations on using BSG in this system; hence, the development of new techniques to valorise this agro-industrial waste is of a great interest as BSG is available in large quantities throughout the year.Two modes of HTL have been investigated to determine the effects of using the BSG with high moisture content. The first mode used the BSG as received without pre-treatment while the second mode used the dried BSG mixed with pure water. The BSG conversion, water-soluble oil (WSO) yield and liquid product generation were measured for both modes. The liquid products were also analysed to determine the types and concentration of valuable products obtained via HTL. The characterisation of the BSG reveals that the moisture content of the BSG is 74.7wt.% while the FTIR spectra confirms the presence of cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin in the BSG. In addition, the comparison between the two HTL modes indicates that the direct HTL gives better BSG conversion, higher WSO yield and higher valuable products concentration. Therefore, it is concluded that BSG has a high potential to be converted into valuable products via direct HTL without pre-treatment. This opens a new opportunity for a sustainable alternative to waste valorizatio

Associated Factor of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and Academic Outcome

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) was defined by recurrent and intrusive thoughts, images or urges (obsessions) and repetitive behaviour or mental acts. There were several themes of OCD symptoms which were checking, symmetry, contamination, repeating, hoarding, cleaning or washing, and counting. Each symptom showed different behaviour. We use Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Scale to measure the severity of obsessive compulsive disorder. Our target population was in secondary school students in Tapah which were Sekolah Menengah Kebangsaan Tapah and Sekolah Menengah Kebangsaan Buyong Adil. The aims of our project were to study the association between OCD and academic outcome. The research design was Cross-Sectional Research. This design was based on observations that take place in different groups at one time. This means that there was no experimental procedure, so no variables are manipulated by the researcher. For example, the variable of interest was age because we wanted to see if any changes were noticed in groups of different ages. We used convenience sampling to conduct the survey. We met Administrative Senior Assistant of the school to find class that was free without disturbing their learning process. Then, we went to the class and distributed the questionnaires. Our respondents were from teenagers in range between 13 to 17 years old and we did not include secondary school students. Moreover, to study the association between OCD and academic outcome, we used chi-square test for the statistical analysis. Thus, we found that there was no significant association between Academic Outcomes and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder since the p-value for Chi-Squared test was more than 0.05 (p-value: 0.092).  We can conclude that the OCD does not affect the academic outcomes of the secondary students. This was because based on our research; the result showed that the respondent’s academic outcomes were majority pass. OCD’s impact on learning cannot be underestimated. So this study was very important in order to estimate the impact. Besides, it was important to educate and give awareness to the public about OCD. It  would be meaningful when people know about this symptoms moreover for those who have OCD. It would help then to control their severity. Keywords: academic, chi-squared, obsessive compulsive disorde

Antimicrobial susceptibility pattern and distribution of ExoU and exoS in clinical isolates of Pseudomonas Aeruginosa at a Malaysian hospital.

This study was conducted to determine the antibiotic susceptibility pattern and distribution of exoU and exoS among 44 clinical isolates of P. aeruginosa collected from different patients over a 3-month period in 2010 at a major Malaysian hospital. Susceptibility data by disk diffusion method for cefepime (30 μg), ceftazidime (30 μg), gentamicin (10 μg), piperacillin-tazobactam (100/10 μg) and ciprofloxacin (5 μg) were available for 38 isolates. Resistance to ceftazidime and piperacillin-tazobactam was the most common (74%) with five isolates not susceptible to three or more different antibiotics. PCR detection of exoU and exoS of all 44 isolates showed the former gene to be present in 18 and exoS in 41. In analyzing the two genes together, 17 isolates were detected for exoU and exoS with only two being negative for both genes. Only one isolate was detected for exoU alone whereas 24 for exoS alone. Distribution of the genes in relation to antibiotic susceptibility was inapplicable due to the majority of the isolates having similar susceptibility patterns, but the tendency of exoU-carrying isolates to be present in male patients (83%) and respiratory sites (61%) was observed (p < 0.050). The finding warrants further investigation in a larger sample of isolates

Evaluation of Transfer Learning Pipeline for ADHD Classification via fMRI Images

In recent times, diverse machine learning models have been employed in this field of technology. Nevertheless, the implementation of learning models for image classification remains uncertain and has proven to be challenging. The utilization of transfer learning (TL) has been showcased as a potent technique for extracting crucial features and can significantly reduce training time. Moreover, the feature extractor model has demonstrated excellent performance in the TL method across numerous applications. As of now, there has been no evaluation of using these methods for ADHD classification through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) applications. The objective of this study is to identify an appropriate pipeline consisting of transfer learning and conventional classifiers for effectively discriminating between individuals with ADHD and those without. For feature extraction, InceptionV3, VGG16, and VGG19 models were employed, which were subsequently combined with either k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) or support vector machine (SVM) classifiers. A dataset consisting of 556 images was collected from the ADHD-200 competition dataset. The data were divided into an 80:20 ratio, with 80% used for training and 20% for testing. The hyperparameters of both k-NN and SVM were optimized using the grid search method. The experimental results revealed that the optimal pipelines were achieved using InceptionV3 coupled with k-NN classifier, where the best parameters were determined as the Minkowski distance metric and a k-value of 1. The pipeline demonstrated a macro-average classification accuracy of 1.00 for the training set and 0.95 for the test set. In summary, the results demonstrate that TL models have successfully exhibited the capability to differentiate fMRI images for ADHD classification

Validity and reliability of Malay version financial well-being scale among Malaysian employees

Financial well-being is perceived as one of the important parameters in measuring a person’s socio-economic status as well as his or her financial situation. While many measures are developed in the West to assess the financial well-being of an individual, a valid and reliable Malay translated scale is still lacking to measure Malaysians’ status of financial well-being. With that in mind, this study aimed to validate Financial Well-being Scale in Malay language (henceforth, FWS-M) among a sample of adult Malaysian employees. The present study commenced with Forward-Backward translations and subsequently subjected to various validation phases: face, content and construct validity. A total of 600 Malaysian employees aged 20 years and above were recruited for the purpose of construct and factorial validations using a random sampling method. The data was analysed using Exploratory Factor Analysis while Cronbach’s Alpha method was employed to identify internal consistency of the scale. The inter-item correlation between items were also ascertained using a Pearson Correlation Coefficient method. The results showed FWS-M is a unidimensional scale with the factor loading ranged between 0.62 and 0.88. Meanwhile, the reliability analysis of this scale revealed a Cronbach’s Alpha coefficient of 0.92, indicating promising internal consistency of the items. The inter-item correlation among items in FWS-M ranged between 0.37 and 0.79. FWS-M is concluded as a valid and reliable unidimensional instrument to assess financial well-being among Malaysians employees

Catalytic transesterification of coconut oil in biodiesel production: A review

Biodiesel is one of the renewable energy (RE) sources that has received much interest due to its promising properties. Recently, the use of coconut oil as biodiesel has caught the attention of many researchers. As a result, this paper presents a comprehensive overview of the current catalysts used to produce coconut oil biodiesel via the transesterification method