Project Abstracts

RIPHEN-JRP Abstracts

UTP - Sustainable Energy

Sustainable Power Generation by Smart Hybrid Solar Thermal and PVT/FC integrated with Battery Storage. Among all the renewable energies, solar is the most available and promising resource for electric power generation. A study has highlighted that solar energy is considered as the best option to provide a low-carbon, and renewable source of energy. Conversion of the solar to electricity may be achieved through solar to chemical conversion, by PV, or by solar to thermal conversion. Solar thermal electricity generation has the tendency to become a major source of cheap electricity. The current proposed major projects indicate a significant possibility for solar thermal power technologies to be used in electricity generation. With that, other energies such as wind, hydropower, and optical technologies should consequently be introduced.Although the parabolic trough solar collectors are being used in many parts of the world and the technology is well developed; there is barely any development in this field under Malaysia’s climate. There is a clear gap in the performance evaluation of stand-alone parabolic trough solar thermal power plant under the real meteorological and environmental surroundings. It has been realized that:• The performance evaluation of stand-alone Parabolic Trough STPP is yet to be carried out for a location with high DNI. • The appropriate CSP technology for Malaysia climatic condition has not yet been identified. • For the best knowledge of the author, there is no thorough research on annual functioning by utilizing PTC under the climate of Malaysia. • Just few researches have revisited the thermal-optical modelling of PTC, which could provide an insight of how their procedures have been carried out.

MMU - Future Cities

Cities are symbols of a country’s economic prosperity. It accounts for about 80% of global GDP. There are an estimated 5 billion people living in cities today and the number is expected to rise by another billion by 2030. The challenge is to design, plan, develop and manage these cities in an efficient and greener manner. With the emergence of Smart Cities or Intelligent Cities, new ways of living are being fashioned through the use of ICT. Through the growing use of 5G connectivity, Internet-of-things, robots, drones and digital security, the urban landscape will change the way we live, work, play and learn. This research seeks to create and innovate the future of cities that will impact our society and culture to provide a sustainable living space. It begins here and now!Digital Constructivist Learning: The Future of Classrooms. The project explores the use of mixed reality technologies and blend them into the F2F classroom settings to create a better learning environment for the learners. The project seeks to redesign the learning space of the classroom into a more experiential-based learning space. Deeply rooted in sound constructivist learning pedagogies such as Kolb Experiential Learning, Learning Design as well as Authentic learning principles, the study will merge the much needed interaction and multiple-disciplinary content with current immersive technologies that will enable the students to experience and visualise learning content like never before. These environment embed highly interactive and cross disciplinary problem-solving learning environments that will inculcate the 4Cs skills needed in the future.

MSU - Digital Education

In the last several years there has been explosive growth of information and communication technologies (ICTs) due to advancement of hardware and software designs. The use of ICT in cities in various forms for different city activities has led to the increased effectiveness of city operations and these cities have been labeled using many terms such as “cyberville”, “digital city”, “electronic city”, “flexicity”, “information city”, “telicity”, “wired city”, and “smart city”. Smart city is the largest abstraction among the labels used as it encompasses other labels used for cities. The smart city is a concept and there is still not a clear and consistent definition of the concept among academia and practitioners. In a simplistic explanation, a smart city is a place where traditional networks and services are made more flexible, efficient, and sustainable with the use of information, digital and telecommunication technologies, to improve its operations for the benefit of its inhabitants. In other words, in a smart city, the digital technologies translate into better public services for inhabitants, and for better use of resources while impacting the environment less. The future of education is paperless, borderless, and tailored towards lifelong learning via MOOC- massive open online courses platform - preferably engaging the 21st century learner actively using instruction platforms accessible on demand. The digitisation of traditional instruments of instruction changes the perspective of the student-instructor model where students are perceived as active learners and the instructor shifts roles into a facilitator position. The ideal scenario assumes knowledge is accessible from the world wide web, students are provided the learning outcomes and are expected to manage their own learning at their own pace. This then shifts the role of the instructor to a more relaxed position instead of actively teaching or lecturing. This research area looks at various models and content development of digital teaching and education across science and technology and non-science and technology clusters.

UniKL - Rail Engineering

As Malaysia has embarked on the initiative of introduction the high speed railway (HSR) from Singapore across peninsular Malaysia, opportunities have arises on the formation of a research center to promote interdisciplinary research in railway infrastructure, engineering and socio-economics; and railway engineering related courses and services. The railway industry demands for competent and knowledgeable young talents to lead and manage the railway industry in various critical fields. The research cluster will cover the field of railway domain including rolling stock, signalling & communication, electrification, permanent way, railway safety, scheduling, customer service, maintenance operation and management of rail technology. Within the Railway Control and Operations Simulation segment, the research will focus on the advanced railway traffic management systems make better use of existing rolling stock and infrastructure and to manage systems disruptions. The Data Integration and Cybersecurity will cover the use of electronic information in the transport domain, from the collection and structured storage of raw data, though efficient processing and algorithms, to the delivery of the appropriate information within the system operations. The Condition Monitoring and Sensing research area will develops bespoke instrumentation and processing systems to measure and predict the health of various railway subsystems. The Power Systems and Energy Use research team will explores aspects relating to energy and power of railway systems and focuses on modelling electric systems and subsystems for railways; carrying out measurement and instrumentation of vehicles, substations and bespoke design of converters for power electronics.

Nilai Uni- Energy 4.0

Heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system is normally used to provide thermal comfort and acceptable indoor air quality. An air conditioning (the AC in HVAC) delivers cooling around a building by the centralized chiller system which consists of chiller, cooling tower and air handling unit (AHU). However, HVAC is generally responsible for a significant proportion of total building energy consumption (approximately more than 40%) which is mainly contributed by the chiller plant. Based on previous energy management studies, majority of total consumption of the chiller plant is caused by the chiller water pump, condenser water pump and cooling tower fan. Currently most devices in the chiller plant operate at fixed nominal set points regardless of the demand of cooling load. Therefore, the efficiency of the chiller plant is not optimized. The main objective of this research is to develop a system to improve the performance of chiller system through optimization of set points. The operating parameters and power consumption of the existing chiller plant will be monitored and analyzed. From the data obtained, the HVAC chiller algorithm will be developed and optimized. The drives will be controlled by the inputs received from IP based sensors which consequently can be used to regulate the specific temperature of the rooms in the building. Based on the optimized HVAC chiller algorithm, optimal set points can be selected and the output from the drives to the load can be controlled. Therefore the power losses can be reduced, and hence energy consumption savings can be achieved.

IUKL - Artificial Intelligent (AI) Technology for Power Management Infrastructure

IUKL will spearhead innovations on artificial intelligence (AI) technology for Smart Society power management infrastructure. The system can be used in both residential and industrial settings. The technology platform will be used to manage an Intelligent Energy Storage system (iES) for efficient, cost effective power management infrastructure using renewable energy as the main source of energy input. The energy platform will enable industries to save thousands through smart energy consumption without disruptions to operations, staff deployment, and management. The system will allow the battery to be charged when cost are low and effective energy distribution when cost is high autonomously. Such power deployment is advantageous as the current power consumption situation is exposed to expensive time-based costs and time of use rates. The IES will perform complex simulations to lower energy costs by virtue of self learning, predictions and optimised energy use in real-time setting. It is impossible to monitor power energy consumption all day long to manage power consumption and reduce costs. Production cycles in most manufacturing sectors are flexible and scalable upon demand. Power consumption demand should be too without the need for manual intervention. The application of real-time complex energy optimisation is urgently required to ensure efficient power use and sustainability to ensure healthy manufacturing growth and profit margin without power wastage or oversupply.The formulation of the IES research components were agreed upon. A committee will be formed to conduct the following research component according to each research partner's experience. The research team has agreed that the component or clusters be divided and arranged accordingly.

UNITEN - Power Engineering (Power Distribution System)

The power distribution system has tremendously contributed in the foundation of civilization. Electricity is one of the essential needs in human daily activities. Nowadays, almost every electrical appliance in home, business and industry are operating with electricity. A huge amount of electrical power is generated with a power plant to be distributed along the grid over power lines. At each substations or transformers, the electrical power is stepped down to facilitate the industrial and residential areas over a distance of few hundred meters. Conventionally, copper wires are employed along the power distribution lines with the advantages of high conductance, resistant to heat and corrosion, malleable and ductile. However, its susceptibility to electromagnetic interference and insensitivity to electrical surges at miniature electricity has paves other alternatives into investigation. Optical fiber provides an excellent solution to the limitations in copper wires. Additionally, optical fiber possesses lower security risk, lower attenuation in longer distance and is relatively lighter than copper wires. This research project aims at demonstrating a power distribution system over optical fiber network in short-haul distance. An optical power distribution system consists of three main components; a transmitter, optical fiber and a receiver. An 850 nm laser is utilized as the transmitter to convert the electrical signal to optical signal. The investigation of the power efficiency of the optical fiber with respect to the laser source will be conducted to determine the most suitable optical fiber to be employed in the project. Next, the integration of three most suitable photovoltaic cells in conjunction to the laser wavelength will be performed to measure the electrical power efficiency. The photovoltaic cell acts as the receiver to accomplish the optical-to-electrical signal conversion in this project. The outcome of this project will lead to the design and development of optical power distribution system.

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