Applied Mechanics and Materials Vol. 892

Abstract: The discharge of arsenic (As) ions into water is a serious issue which needs to be curbed effectively due to the hazards of As exposure. Hence, a simple, cheap and effective removal procedure is required in order to meet water quality standards. In this research, magnetite (Fe₃O₄) particles coated with humic acid were investigated for its efficacy in adsorbing As. The particles were synthesised by varying the temperature (70, 80 and 90°C) and concentration of humic acid (1%, 2% and 3%) to study the corresponding changes in terms of size, structure and As adsorption performance. The phase and size were characterised with X-ray Diffraction and Dynamic Light Scattering technique, respectively. The performance of the synthesised particles in removing As (V) was quantitatively analysed using the colorimetric method with the assistance of a double-beam Ultraviolet-Visible Spectrophotometry. XRD analysis confirms the formation of magnetite while samples coated with 2% and 3% humic acid exhibited less crystallised structures. From the DLS analysis, Fe₃O₄ was found to have an average size of 2238nm while humic acid coated-Fe₃O₄ had increased particle sizes of between 2400nm to 3712nm. All the synthesised magnetite particles were able to remove certain percentages of As (V) from water. The highest adsorption capacity obtained was 1.984 mg/g and the lowest was 1.376 mg/g for a contact times of 40 minutes and 20 minutes, respectively.

Abstract: This paper presents the fun and engagement elements, and the assessment methods of these two elements for children. Fun to children is something they do that is amusing or enjoyable. Engagement refers to how a child shares a positive connection to peers or activities. Both of these elements could be an important factor to support and strengthen learning among children. We employed the Again-again table and the Adaptive Behaviour Scale [24] from Bayley-III to measure and to assess fun and engagement, particularly in educational mobile apps for children with speech delay. A local prototype of speech therapy mobile application was used in the experiment, and the results have shown that both fun and engagement are correlated.

Abstract: Economics is the first supply for the survival of a country, especially in the development, development and progress. The more developed a country is the better economic growth. Indonesia including the user databases on the economy, especially in the banking sector and the government. Government as the manager of the country's economy in order to make extra efforts of the people and citizens can get considerable economic assistance through various operations conducted by the government such as the division of poor rice and BPJS card. BPJS stands for Badan Penyelenggara Jaminan Sosial (Social Insurance Administration Organization). By doing classifying economic levels using Fuzzy Multiple Attribute Decision Making (FMADM) methods (Simple Additive Weighting) meant that applications created can be used as a tool to suppress errors and improve accuracy by minimizing the possibility of such a wrong target or targets. The application uses the input in the form of data that has a high level of security to be forged such as: proof of payment of electricity bills, vehicle tax, and property tax. Data from the family card to input the number of people staying. The results are sorted according emerged from the lowest to the highest. The calculations were already system and by calculation that has been designed is expected to work as expected.

Abstract: An application of efficient crime analysis is beneficial and helpful to understand the behavior of trend and pattern of crimes. Crime forecasting is an area of research that assists authorities in enforcing early crime prevention measures. Statistical technique has been widely applied in the past to develop crime forecasting models. However, it has been observed that researchers have begun to shift their research interests from statistical model to artificial intelligence model in crime forecasting. Thus, this study is conducted to observe the capabilities of artificial intelligence technique in improving crime forecasting. The main objective of this study is to conduct a comparative analysis on forecasting performance capabilities of four artificial intelligence techniques, namely, artificial neural network (ANN), support vector regression (SVR), random forest (RF), and gradient tree boosting (GTB) in forecasting crime rate. Forecasting capability of each technique was assessed in terms of measurement of errors. From the result obtained, GTB showed the highest performance capability where it scored the lowest measurement of errors compared to SVR, RF, and ANN.

Abstract: Getting rid of unwanted noise in car compartment is necessary and really significant measure for automotive makers. This research was directed to produce nonwoven material from Kenaf fiber using the needle-punching machine and the ability of the produced material to absorb sound will be tested. The performance in sound absorption of the sample was analyzed by the sound absorption coefficient (SAC) and noise reduction coefficient (NRC) using the impedance tube test referring to ASTM E1050-98. The sound absorption frequencies were evaluated utilizing the two-microphone transfer function technique in the impedance tube that has a 100 mm diameter for low frequency and 28 mm for high frequency, 0 Hz to 4000 Hz respectively. The physical examination also was executed according to ASTM D1772 to determine the density and the thickness of each sample. The parameter verified in this research is the number of layers to form the samples and it also were compared with the commercial products. As the outcome of this research, the sound absorption coefficient (SAC) showed that the sound reduction coefficient value was increased as the number of layers of the sample increase. In summation, the result also proved that the denser the samples, the higher the absorption coefficient value. On the other hand, for the noise reduction coefficient (NRC), overall result showed slight differences between each sample. The result is due to the rating is an average, two materials with the same rating might not perform the same. Referring to the previous research, the sample with higher areal density is dependable for higher sound reduction and there is a negative relationship between area density and bulk density of needle-punched nonwoven and sound reduction. With the rise in the number of density of nonwoven fabric, the sound reduction through the fabric increases at first but after the maximum it remains almost unaffected.

Abstract: Traditionally the chemical industry uses coal, minerals and petroleum as its basic raw materials, but palm oil and palm kernel oil are being increasingly used as economical raw materials especially for the production of oleochemicals. High magnitude palm oil price volatility in recently years has been a major challenge faced the industry. Though many time series models have been developed, few have wide adoption in the industry, and one of the key issues is the sampling interval used in the models. To date, little effort has been spent on mining historical data to determine the representativeness of interval sampling. This paper presents a novel approach in identifying price equilibrium for crude palm oil by mining the sampling amount through historical price distribution. Evaluation is done on the outcomes of the experiment, and analysis is performed on the attributes of each different criteria of the price distribution. The performance of the proposed approach is also compared to the conventional Bollinger Band with static sampling size. Overall, the preliminary results show that price distribution with leptokurtic distribution outperforms other price distribution patterns, this will definitely assist further works to devise a novel financial time series analysis technique.

Abstract: Recycling is one of the important approaches to manage the waste effectively. Nowadays, many recycle bins were placed in school, university, shopping complex and housing area. Although most of them have good awareness to support these activities, yet there are still who abuse the usage of recycling bin by inserting prohibited items. To cater such an issue, a Reverse Vending Machine (RVM) with material identification module is proposed to accept only empty recycle items and reject the rest. The constructed system consists of rotating mechanism and collection of sensors to detect empty PET bottle and aluminum can respectively. From the experiment, it can be shown that the module capable to reject unwanted material with an average of 82.5% of accuracy. Such capability shows a promising outcome for preventing the abuse of recycling bins, and can be used to realize the RVM concept by introducing a reward to the person who recycle properly.

Abstract: In this paper, an FPGA-based microwave oven controller design which can be implemented using Altera DE1 development board is presented. The motivation for this work is to explore FPGA for real time applications. First, a microwave oven controller design architecture that could fit into Altera DE1 board, utilizing on-board peripherals is developed. Then, using the proposed architecture, the design is implemented using Verilog HDL. The microwave oven functionalities are demonstrated using Altera DE1 development board by means of Quartus II 13.0 software. The testbenches are created and waveforms are generated using Modelsim 10.1d software. The simulation results for various cases have been presented and the results confirmed that all the basic functionalities of a practical microwave oven can be realized. The proposed FPGA based controller has a high potential for incorporation in microwave ovens.

Abstract: The design of artificial metamaterial (MTM) has been proposed as an effective medium with extracted scattering parameter by applying Nicolson-Ross-Weir (NWR) equation to achieved negative permittivity and permeability. The novel architecture of ‘Folded-Line’ Left-handed metamaterial (FL-LHM) consist of split ring resonator SRR is designed and modified using LC lump elements analysis to extend bandwidth and operational frequency at 6 GHz to 12 GHz. In this study, we proposed metamaterial novel unit cell designs and simulate the performance in terms of the distribution of electric and magnetic fields, absorption, transmittance and reflectance. The unit cell of FL-LHM as medium allows controlling electromagnetic waves can cause backwave propagation is observed electromagnetic response that current induced in the closed FL-LHM unit cell. This design has its own advantage in term of FL-LHM parameter width, thickness, and absorption bandwidth and transmittance wavelength, might be severely important for particular purposes such as waveguiding or sensing application.

Abstract: To ease hardware design process, circuits are normally designed in description languages such as Verilog and VHDL. The correctness of circuits is normally checked by exhaustive simulation in simulators such as Icarus and VCS. Both the description languages Verilog/VHDL and simulators Icarus/VCS do not have mathematical foundations and hence are not reliable and cannot be used to mathematically prove correctness of circuit designs. Hardware description languages with mathematical (formal) foundation such as VeriFormal, on the other hand, are more reliable, trustworthy and can be used for robust design. In this paper, we report our results of formal verifications of two simple hardware circuits designed in the formal description language VeriFormal. Using the VeriFormal simulator and the accompanied type checker tools, we prove reliability properties type safety, functional correctness and functional equivalence of the digital circuits.