Petroleum and mineral based fluids have, for almost one century, been used for cooling and insulation purposes. Their popularity stems out of their availability and cheapness. However, recent evidence has shown deficiencies witb these fluids: They have low properties especially flash and fire points and most importantly low dielectric break down voltage. The most serious of these shortcomings is the inability to meet up with health and environmental laws. This is because they are not'organic and hence not biodegradable; their spillage takes very long time to decompose. These developments have led to seeking alternatives in vegetable based fluids. The fluids tried and confirmed to be used as dielectric fluids include Castor oil, Cocoanut oi!, Soya bean oil, Rapeseed oil etc. This work has measured the properties of palm oil against the IEEE C637 and ASTM D section for possible use as a dielectric fluid. The result shows that treated palm oil has break down voltage of 75 KV/mm, flash point (>220), fire point (r220) and moisture content (0.08%). Hence this has shown the potential of palm oil as a dielectric fluid.However future work should focus on further investigation before field application. Malaysia as a country stands a lot or gains in this type of research, since it i s a world is leader in palm oil production.

In this paper, a particle swarm optimization (PSO) method is proposed to design Quantitative Feedback Theory (QFT) control. This method minimizes a proposed cost function subject to appropriate robust stability and performance QFT constraints. The PSO algorithm is simple and easy to implement, and can be used to automate the loop shaping procedures of the standard QFT. The proposed method is applied to the high uncertainty pneumatic servo actuator system as an example to illustrate the design procedure of the proposed algorithm. The proposed method is compared with the standard QFT control. The results show that the superiority of the proposed method in that it can achieve the same robustness requirements of standard QFT control with simple structure and low order controller.

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