Due to proliferation of electronic devices, the electromagnetic field (EMF) exposure affect human health in long term. On the other hand the operation electronic devices will be affected if the radiation level is too high. To reduce the radiation exposure, shielding is always used. Instead of building a shielding enclosure inside a building, it is more practical to improve the shielding capability of the building itself. Hence, this project intend to investigate the shielding effectiveness (SE) of cement added with graphite. Eight cement-graphite specimens with different percentages (0%, 3%, 7%, 11%, 15%, 19%, 25% and 30%) are prepared. They have been casted into the waveguide mold with size of 4.75 cm x 1 cm x 2.22 cm and taken for measurement directly. The SE measurement setup involve a pair of waveguide with frequency range of 3.8 GHz to 6 GHz and vector network analyser (VNA). Throughout the study, it is found that the percentage of graphite powder will affect the SE of the specimens. The SE is independent on its curing duration. More than 11% of graphite is needed to improve the SE of cement block in between 3.8 GHz to 6 GHz. The highest SE of 33 dB is achieved when the sample contains 30% of graphite with thickness of 1cm.
Ammonia is a common pollutant in water as the result of runoff in agricultural areas where it is applied as fertilizer. It must be monitored regulary for safety purpose. The current testing technique does not allow on-site measurement as the equipment are bulky, the measurement process is time-consuming and tedious with additional mixing reagents. In this study, the presence of ammonia in distilled water is estimated from open-ended coaxial probe in the range of 200 MHz to 14000 MHz. Experimental results were obtained from two set of samples with seven different ammonia concentration each. The measurements are repeated thrice hence producing forty-two data sets with 550 points. Both curve fitting and multiple regression analysis were considered to perform valid ammonia concentration projection. Validation based on 5-fold and 10-fold cross validation suggested the feasibility of the technique as it presents root mean square error (RMSE) which is less than 0.02 in the ammonia prediction. Detection method based on open-ended probe would be convenient, simple and accurate method for in-situ determination of ammonia concentration.
<span lang="EN-GB">Communication is very important for people including adults and babies to exchange their thoughts, views and information. They can express their thoughts verbally and non-verbally. Baby sign language is non-verbal type that consists of a set of standard and organised form of hand gestures motion to represent different word. This language allows the children who have hearing impairment problem to communicate with others. In addition, it can also be taught to normal babies to convey their need before they have the ability to speak. It is very challenging for adults to understand babies and children with hearing impaired problem. Thus, a real-time hand gesture recognition system has been developed for adult to interactively learn the baby sign language. Firstly, the face region was detected in order to use the skin colour model of the face to detect the hand. After that, the hand shape was determined by finding the palm centre and convex hull. Convexity defects which representing gaps between the fingers were used to determine the number of fingertips whereas the movement of the hand was detected based on motion analysis. By setting the background colour to blue and adding extra light in front of the laptop, the system successfully obtained an accuracy higher than 85% rate for sign “mom”, “eat” and “milk” when tested on Malay, Chinese and Indian races in Malaysia.</span>
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