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Mariposa Christia Vespertilionis (MCV) is a plant which have being known as ‘red butterfly wing’ to local people in Malaysia. MCV has been known to be used as a traditional treatment for bundle of diseases such as tuberculosis, bronchitis, inflamed tonsils, colds, muscle weakness and poor blood circulation. Supercritical Fluid Extraction (SFE) is the technology equipment that can be used for the extraction of MCV leaves for its valuable compound. SFE is a process of separating inner matrix from outside matrix by extracting inner compound with CO2 as the main solvent. SFE technology is widely used in extraction of herbal plant because of the environmental friendly process compared to the conventional extraction with eco-friendly co-solvent used like ethanol. The objectives of this study was to analyze the optimum parameter of CO2 flow rate among selected parameter range (15g/min – 35g/min), to analyze the optimum parameter of co-solvent percentage among selected parameter range (5% - 25%) and to study the pressure behavior effect on extraction yield of MCV leaves using SFE-CO2. The fixed variables in this study were temperature at 50°C, particle size of 63 µm, ethanol as the co-solvent and extraction time was fixed to 1 hour for all parameters. After SFE extraction process, the co-solvent was separated from the extract using Rotary Evaporator (ROVAP) with 76°C temperature in order to obtain the final extraction yield of MCV leaves. At the end of the study, for the CO2 flow rate, it was noticed that the extraction yield improved starting from 5 to 25 g/min and declined after that. Thus the optimum CO2 flow rate was 25 g/min with extraction yield of 31.22%. For the co-solvent, the result of the extraction yield was directly relative to the percentage of the co-solvent. As the percentage of co-solvent increased, the extraction yield was also increased. The optimum extraction yield was 40.93% with 30% co-solvent. For the pressure behaviour, the higher number of pressure magnitude would give higher extraction yield. The optimum extraction yield was 39.47% with 9 pressure magnitudes.

A study was conducted to determine the characteristics and potential use of surface water and groundwater at UTHM campus. Electrical Resistivity Imaging (ERI) was carried out previously in this study to interpret the potential shallow groundwater as to identify the depth and variation of aquifer layer. Three representative groundwater were collected from three new installation boreholes, while surface water was collected from nearest (lakes, swale and retention pond). Nine samples from surface water and groundwater were use and degree correspondences of major cation and major anions among them were analyses in determining their hydrochemical characteristics and the quality suitability for irrigation supply purposes. In general, trend of concentration distribution among cations shows Na+ > Ca2+ > K+ > Mg2+ while anions exhibit similar distributions patterns where Cl- > SO4 2- > NO3 for both surface water and groundwater samples. Almost all the groundwater sample is characterized by types of saline water due to high content of chloride, sodium and high electrical conductivity value. The high concentration in groundwater could be due to location of study that situated on marine clay layer which have been intrusion with seawater.

In this current and recent decade, various data and information are actively collected. The problem with increasing data from year to year has made it difficult for people to make the right decision. This is because when data increased, the number of options to choose from will also increase. Therefore, recommendation systems are needed to address this problem and help recommend to users some options that meet their desirable requirements only. In this study, recommendation systems in the field of filming were conducted to provide movie recommendations services for users by using the content-based recommendation system and collaborative filtering recommendation system. For content-based recommendation system, movie recommendations are done by looking for similarities between active user profiles and movie genres. The similarities between active user profiles and movie genres are calculated by using the cosine similarity measure. For collaborative filtering recommendation system, movie recommendations are made by calculating the predicted rating for active users based on the rating values from their nearest neighbours. The nearest neighbours are identified by calculating the cosine similarity measure between the active users and existing users in the data set. Comparisons for these two recommendation systems are performed to identify which system works best in recommending movies to active users. The results show that the collaborative filtering recommendation system is more suitable in recommending movies to active users because this system is more successful in producing desirable recommendations compared to content-based recommendation system.

An investigation of khatrah technique in archery was carried out. An electromyography (EMG) experiment was conducted towards six wrist muscles which are flexor carpi radialis, extensor carpi ulnaris and extensor digitorum communis for both arms. The maximum voluntary contraction (MVC) and activity data were recorded. The bow arm produced a higher muscle force compared to draw arm muscles during release phase. However, the muscle forces produced by bow arm had a consistency in term of pattern throughout the phases. In conclusion, the forces generated by the professional archer produced a force benchmark at the wrist joint to alleviate the risk of injury.

Twitter is a social media service which enable users to send and also received messages or post known as tweet. In the era of big data, one of the main source of data is from Twitter. However, this types of data usually are unstructured, massive and complicated to be analyzed. In this study, Twitter’s data from Malaysian users were collected for one whole week. The objectives are to study the daily rhythm of Twitter usage in Malaysia and also to identify relationships between various types of Twitter users in Malaysia. Since the data are unstructured, pre-processing technique have to be done on the collected data which will enable the data to be analysed. The post-processed data were then analyze by using various statistical analysis tools. From the result of the analysis, we observed some interesting findings which are useful on the describing usage behaviour of Malaysian Twitter users.

The purpose of the study was to determine the effects of increment of loads to lower extremity joints during the two-hand kettlebell swing (KS) activity with loads of 4 kg, 6 kg and 8 kg. Three male adults participated in this study. Subjects were required to perform a two-hand KS with three different loads which were 4 kg, 6 kg and 8 kg. A Vicon Nexus system (v1.5.2) with three infrared cameras adjusted with 100 Hz speed were used to capture KS motion to produce kinematics data for lower extremity joints which were ankle, knee and hip joints. The results showed that mean maximum flexion angle (MFA) of ankle, knee and hip joints decreased as load increased. Mean MFA of knee joint was the highest while mean MFA of ankle joint was the smallest recorded. Mean MFA of ipsilateral leg was higher than that of contralateral leg for a right-dominant subject.

At present time, Mariposa Christia Vespertillonis (MCV) leave has become popular for its anti-cancer and thus is used widely among the traditional medicine in Malaysia. There are several types of MCV plants and the one that is currently well-known for traditional medicine in Malaysia is the green MCV (GMCV). Red MCV (RMCV) is another type of MCV plant which can also be found easily in Malaysia. In this study, the active compounds for GMCV and RMCV will be compared and analyzed by using Liquid Chromatography - Mass Spectrometry (LC-MS). The active compounds will be extracted from the MCV leaves by using Supercritical Fluid Extraction (SFE). The findings of this study indicates the global yield of the MCV oils is 31 mg/g while the compound identification indicates the presence of anti-cancer, anti-inflammatory and beneficial phytochemicals. This work is an explorative study to reveal the potential of MCV to be extracted using SFE method as potential therapeutic plants for the traditional medicine in Malaysia.

Palm oil is deemed as one of the most important commodity that forms the economic backbone of Malaysia. Modeling and forecasting the daily price of palm oil is of great interest for Malaysia's economic growth. In this study, time series ARIMA models are used to fit the daily price of palm oil. The Akaike Infromation Criterion (AIC), Akaike Infromation Criterion with a correction for finite sample sizes (AICc) and Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) are used to compare between different ARIMA models being considered. It is found that ARIMA(1,2,1) model is suitable for daily price of crude palm oil in Malaysia for the year 2010 to 2012.

It has been estimated that 20-70% of the used urea goes to the environment via leaching, nitrification and volatilization which not only harms the environment but also reduces the urea efficiency. By coating the urea granules, the farmers can achieve high urea performance through controlling the excess release of nitrogen. Up until now, different materials have been tested for nutrients retention. However, most of them are either expensive or unfriendly to the environment. Being cheap and biodegradable materials, the starches may also be used to coat the urea fertilizer for controlling the nutrients release. However, the pure starches do not meet the standards set by many industrial processes due to their slow tacking and too low viscosities and should be modified for getting smooth, compact and mechanically stronger coatings. In these studies, the tapioca starch was modified by reacting it with urea and different masses of borax. The prepared solutions were used to coat the urea granules of 3.45 mm average diameter. Different volumes (1, 1.5 and 2 mL) of each solution were used to coat 30 g of urea fluidized above the minimum level of fluidization. It was noticed that the coating thickness, percent coating, dissolution rate and percent release follow an increasing trend with an increase of solution volume; however, some random results were obtained while investigating the solution volume effects on the percent release. It was seen that the nutrients percent release over time increases with an increase in solution volume from 1 to 1.5 mL and thereafter reaches to a steady state. It confirms that the 1.5 mL of solution for 30 g urea samples will give the optimized coating results.

A model for a oscillating flap wave energy converter (WEC) is as a single degree of freedom system with a non-linear term to allow for the drag of the device through the water, known as the Morison term. The focus of this system identification is on estimating the dynamic state of the system and estimating the non-linear parameter from observations of the wave elevation and the vertical displacement of the device. It is assumed that the mass, stiffness and damping of the system, without the Morison term, are known from the physical characteristics of the device. The Kalman Filter (KF) can be used to estimate the states of a linear system, however, it is not directly applicable to a non-linear system. Various adaptations have been proposed for non-linear systems. One of the first was the extended Kalman Filter (EKF) which relied on a linearization about the current state values. However, an alternative approach, known as the unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) has been found to give a better performance and is e...

Rainfall characteristics can be analyzed by using storm events with storms representing actual rainfall events instead of rainfall amounts in fixed time frames. One of the most commonly used methods in rainfall analysis is the construction of intensity-duration-frequency (IDF) curves. IDF curves help in designing hydraulic structures by providing a mathematical relationship between storm intensity, duration and return period. In Peninsular Malaysia, these curves are often built using the generalized extreme value (GEV) distribution to represent annual maximum storm intensity. The mathematical formula for the curves is usually taken from either known empirical equations or from quantile functions of probability distributions. However, there is no research which compares and analyzes the differences between the curves obtained for storms in Peninsular Malaysia based on the empirical and quantile functions. Thus, the aim of this study is to build IDF curves for storms in Peninsular Malaysia using typical empirical equations and the quantile function of the GEV distribution. Then, the analysis of differences is performed on the curves obtained from both approaches. The analysis consists of the coefficient of variation of root mean square error mean percentage difference and the coefficient of determination, R2. The analysis shows small differences between the curves based on the empirical equations and those obtained using the quantile function of GEV distribution. According to these results, it can be concluded that the simple empirical equations are sufficient in constructing IDF curves based on GEV distribution for storms in Peninsular Malaysia.