Universiti Teknologi Petronas

About: Universiti Teknologi Petronas is a education organization based out in Ipoh, Malaysia. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Adsorption & Ionic liquid. The organization has 6127 authors who have published 11284 publications receiving 119400 citations.

Deep-learning: A potential method for tuberculosis detection using chest radiography

Abstract: Tuberculosis (TB) is a major health threat in the developing countries. Many patients die every year due to lack of treatment and error in diagnosis. Developing a computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system for TB detection can help in early diagnosis and containing the disease. Most of the current CAD systems use handcrafted features, however, lately there is a shift towards deep-learning-based automatic feature extractors. In this paper, we present a potential method for tuberculosis detection using deep-learning which classifies CXR images into two categories, that is, normal and abnormal. We have used CNN architecture with 7 convolutional layers and 3 fully connected layers. The performance of three different optimizers has been compared. Out of these, Adam optimizer with an overall accuracy of 94.73% and validation accuracy of 82.09% performed best amongst them. All the results are obtained using Montgomery and Shenzhen datasets which are available in public domain.

Lead and cadmium removal from wastewater using eco-friendly biochar adsorbent derived from rice husk, wheat straw, and corncob

Abstract: Cleaner and sustainable water production lead to the development of environmentally friendly adsorbent materials for energy-efficient, cost-effective, and cleaner water production. In this study, the biochar derived from the rice husk, wheat straw, and corncob has been used for the adsorptive removal of heavy metals, including the lead (Pb+2) and cadmium (Cd+2). The synthesised biochar was characterised by a different structural and analytical approach. The characterisation of biochar revealed the existence of the combined redox, i.e. reductive and oxidative surface functional groups along with some inert functional groups which play a significant role in donating or accepting an electron to degrade the pollutants in the wastewater. The biochar synthesised in this study was found to be amorphous, and some negligible disorders and defects have been observed in the structure of biochar. The biochar has been highly stable under harsh thermal conditions by sustaining significant weight over a temperature of 700 ​°C and also be hygroscopic. The biochar rice husk, wheat straw, and corncob demonstrated the lead (Pb+2) adsorption capacity of 96.41%, 95.38%, and 96.92%, while for cadmium (Cd+2), the uptake capacity was found to be 94.73%, 93.68%, and 95.78%. The reported biochar is a cleaner, environmentally friendly, economical, and sustainable alternative to conventional adsorbent materials.

Acid esterification of a high free fatty acid crude palm oil and crude rubber seed oil blend: Optimization and parametric analysis

Abstract: Free fatty acids content plays an important role in selecting the appropriate route for biodiesel production. Oils with high content of free fatty acids can be treated by acid esterification where an alcohol reacts with the given oil in the presence of acid catalyst. In the current study, an equivolume blend of crude rubber seed oil and crude palm oil is fed to the reaction with methanol as the alcohol of choice and sulfuric acid. Selected reaction parameters were optimized, using Taguchi method for design of experiments, to yield the lowest free fatty acid content in the final product. The investigated parameters include alcohol to oil ratio, temperature and amount of catalyst. The effect and significance of each parameter were then studied based on the fractional factorial design and verified by additional experiments. The optimum conditions for acid esterification which could reduce the free fatty acid content in the feedstock to lower than 0.6% (95% reduction) were 65 °C, 15:1 methanol to oil ratio (by mole) and 0.5 wt% H 2 SO 4 after 3 h of reaction time. Temperature had been found to have the most effect on the reduction of free fatty acids followed by reactants ratio while increasing catalyst amount had nominal effect.

On the performance of accelerated particle swarm optimization for charging plug-in hybrid electric vehicles

Abstract: Transportation electrification has undergone major changes since the last decade. Success of smart grid with renewable energy integration solely depends upon the large-scale penetration of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) for a sustainable and carbon-free transportation sector. One of the key performance indicators in hybrid electric vehicle is the State-of-Charge (SoC) which needs to be optimized for the betterment of charging infrastructure using stochastic computational methods. In this paper, a newly emerged Accelerated particle swarm optimization (APSO) technique was applied and compared with standard particle swarm optimization (PSO) considering charging time and battery capacity. Simulation results obtained for maximizing the highly nonlinear objective function indicate that APSO achieves some improvements in terms of best fitness and computation time.