Sustainable electricity power supply is crucial especially for less populated rural area. Micro hydropower generation in rural area is important in providing electricity especially in off-grid electricity area. This study aims to predict and harness power from micro hydropower generation through conical gravitational water vortex turbine (GWVT) via SOLIDWORKS flow simulation. Conical GWVT under study was designed as fully enclosed system with conical turbine basin. Two different turbine orientations were simulated i.e., vertical and horizontal at different blade angle designs i.e., 25°, 45°, 75°, 90°, and 120° and with different number of blades i.e., 8, 12, and 18 while forces were harnessed at tangential (z-axis) direction. The simulation results showed that it was possible to run and produce force from conical GWVT design in a fully enclosed system. It was found that vertical turbine orientation produced a slightly higher force than horizontally orientated turbine, using 12 runner blades at 90° angles where the distributed forces were 15.31N and 14.12N respectively, at tangential (z-axis) direction. The results are useful to predict turbine’s torque for small capacity micro hydropower electricity generation prior to actual conical GWVT set up, in rural area, to minimise cost implication and construction issues.

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pH sensor is one of the sensing principles that can be employed in detection of engine oil deterioration. To avoid unnecessary changing of engine oil while maintaining the oil quality consumed by car’s engine, engine oil deterioration sensor is required to continuously monitor the oil condition. In this work, we fabricated pH sensor sensing layer made up of tantalum thin film. Ta2O5nanotubular was constructed as the medium of interaction to measure the quality of engine oil. Anodization synthesis method was used to fabricate the sensing layer by varying the anodization time. Two samples anodized at 30 min and 60 min were tested in pH buffer solution at pH ranging from 2, 4, 7, 10 and 12. Further characterization using field emission scanning electron microscope (FESEM) was conducted to investigate the surface morphology properties, while X-ray diffraction (XRD) was conducted to obtain crystal properties of Ta2O5nanotubular. A homogeneous Ta2O5nanostructures with cubic crystal structure and pore diameter ranging between 15 to 20 nm was obtained. 30 min sample tested in pH buffer solution has better adsorption of H+ions with linear pH sensitivity of 31.616 mV/pH and good stability. Therefore, anodization method can be an alternative to fabricate pH sensor for oil deterioration detection system.Additionally, other study on chemical sensor for the detection of engine oil deterioration level wasalsodiscussed in this paper.

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