Norhaslinda Hasim

Development of fuzzy logic water bath temperature controller using MATLAB

In this paper, the development of a water bath temperature system to control the liquids temperature in the water bath will be presented. In order to develop the water bath temperature control system, MATLAB fuzzy logic toolbox will be utilized. The Fuzzy Logic Controller (FLC) is designed to control water temperature based on the input acquired from the thermal transducer sensor. The inference engines that are used are; Max-min (Mamdani) method and centre of gravity technique for defuzzification. The 4 × 4 matrix rules for the controller will be used in this project. In addition, the USB NI-DAQ card will be used as xPC target to link the MATLAB software and real time application. The real time output temperature is validated based on the simulations temperature which is initially set by user. It can be concluded the performance of real time study is in par with the simulation result.

Lightning Energy: A Lab Scale System

This chapter which has six subchapters explains the energy storage system in harvesting a lightning return stroke for a lab scale system. Nowadays, the world is facing the energy crisis and consequently a renewable energy is required as an energy contributor to solve the crisis. Hence, it is believed that lightning return stroke has a good future to be a free electricity sources. The main difficulty in harnessing the lightning stroke is to attract and simultaneously to store the energy, which limited in a microsecond. Due to that, the computer simulation works using PSpice is done as the preliminary effort intended for the hardware development as well as to understand and verify the proposed system. A lab scale system is set up based on natural characteristics of lightning to determine the performance of the sample capacitor as energy storage accurately. Hence, the single stroke impulse voltage is used as a mock of lightning. Regarding the energy storage device, the capacitor is employed due to the reliability, cost-effective and it is the most common. In addition, the direct tapping system and the high speed switching is most wanted in order to make the whole system more realistic. The capacitors are subjected to 1.2/50μs, 4,200V single-stroke impulse voltages generated by a single stage impulse generator. In this chapter, the energy of impulse voltage that successfully transferred and stored in the storage capacitors is discussed. Basically, the efficiency of the energy transfer is depends on the capacitance values and the switching times. As a final point, the lab scale system explained in this chapter demonstrates the capability to capture the energy from lightning return strokes that can be a clean energy sources. On the other side, lightning which have extremely high current and high voltage is a gratis electricity energy sources that can be replenished. The lab scales systems for harvesting the energy from lightning return stroke, which discussed in this chaper able to give a new contribution to solve the energy crisis and it will be very challenging. Up until now, the mature technology in harvesting the lightning stroke for the large-scale system is still not yet ready and the relevant scientific literature is not easily found. It noted that the final system proposed in this chapter would provide an understanding of the system principle and additionally provide a noteworthy contribution for further research.

CM NCTF with Velocity Feedforward Controller Design for Tracking Control of an AC Driven X-Y Ball Screw Mechanism

This paper presents an improved practical controller for enhancing the tracking performance of a ball screw mechanism. Essentially, a controller with practical and easy to design has been preferred for high motion control performance. The existing continuous motion nominal characteristic trajectory following (CM NCTF) controller demonstrates a low accuracy achievement at high frequency motion, where at 5 Hz, the percentage of error are higher than 10% and 15% for amplitude of 1 mm and 10 mm respectively. The NCTF controller comprises of a nominal characteristic trajectory (NCT) and a PI compensator where the controller parameters are easily determined and it is free from exact modeling. In this paper, the CM NCTF controller with velocity feedforward compensator has been proposed in order to enhance the tracking motion accuracy. The simulation results shown that the CM NCTF controller with velocity feedforward compensator achieves better tracking performances than that the CM NCTF controller alone by showing more than three times smaller motion error.

Comparative study for bitumen containment strategy using different radar types for level detection

This paper analyzes the radar performance of a bitumen liquid level detection. In previous installation, radar A and B has successfully found its place to detect bitumen liquid level in tank storage. The problems occur when these two types of radar continuously give the frequent peak error in liquid level measurement output readings. With an advanced technology this research proposes of using radar C. By focusing at the frequency of error occurrence as each radar performance is continuously monitored in 8 weeks, radar A gives 55, radar B gives 19 while radar C gives 4 times. From the overall performance of usable radar based on frequency of error occurrence, the minimum error was given by radar C which makes it the most effective to be used in bitumen liquid level detection as it provided more reliable, repeatable and reasonable level measurement results value.