Mohamad Faiz Zainuddin

Low Cost and Simple Procedure to Determine Water Turbidity with Image Processing

This paper demonstrates a simple and cost effective procedure to measure water turbidity with image processing. Water samples were first placed inside a dark cabin before digital images of the samples were captured with smartphone camera. The red, blue and green (RGB) images were processed to obtain greyscale images, which later converted to mean greyscale index (MGI). A total of 27 formazine samples were prepared and tested to develop a calibration equation relating MGI and nephelometry turbidity unit (NTU) with regression value of R2 = 0.96. This procedure is only valid for the range of turbidity between 0 and 100 NTU. The total cost of this procedure, excluding the smartphone, was only RM16.20 which is much less than the cost of commercial turbidimeters and other proposed cost-effective counterparts.

Determination of ethanol concentration of ethanol/water mixture solutions with open ended coaxial method

This study presents a simple and non-destructive procedure to determine ethanol concentration of ethanol/water solution at ambient temperature based on HP85070B open ended coaxial dielectric constant measurement. The motivation for this study stems from the fact that the ‘true’ concentration of ethanol in a ‘labeled’ container could be ‘spoiled’ due to hygroscopic nature of ethanol, evaporation and other factors. The dielectric constant measurements of eight samples with different molar fraction were validated with modified Cole-Cole-Debye (3CC) simulations. A 5th degree polynomial calibration equation was developed based on 3CC simulations with R2 = 0.9998 and used to estimate the ‘true’ concentration of three ethanol samples obtained from ‘labeled’ containers kept in laboratory. The ethanol concentrations of two of the samples were found to be much lower than what was indicated on their labels, hence, assumed spoiled.

Application of a Monopole Sensor for Rapid in situ Water Quality Assessment: Theoretical Analysis

This initial study proposes a rapid and cost effective in situ water quality assessment based on reflection coefficient of a 1.749 cm long bare monopole senor. The reflection coefficient of the monopole sensor in air, water and ethanol were studied from measurement and calculations of Finite Element Method (FEM). FEM was used to calculate the reflection coefficient of the sensor in water/ethanol mixture solution.