In Singapore’s limited land space, hydroponics, a soil-free method of that uses irrigation gained popularity for urban farming. Vertical farming can be made more sustainable by integrating Internet-of-Things (IoT) and solar photovoltaic (PV) as an intelligent system. This study aims to conduct a feasibility study on using PV cells to reduce energy consumption in IoT-enabled irrigation control and monitoring systems. In the experiment, an intelligent water irrigation system was designed for data collection including energy harvested from PV, climate conditions, and water quality. It was observed that a 45 Watt peak (Wp) solar PV was able to produce up to 460-watt hours of stored electricity in a day which can power a standalone hydroponic system that consists of a 19 W water pump and light emitting diode (LED) grow lights rated at 14 W/m. The climate monitoring system matched meteorological data from online sources proving to be applicable in the prototype. Water conditions such as water temperature and electrical conductivity (EC) also correlate to readings taken from traditional handheld water quality testers. Based on the fabricated prototype, integration is deemed to be feasible using power harvested from the sun.

Now a days, the global warming has increased the temperature in the environment that forced the building occupant to get assisting from the air condition to reduce the heat tension inside the building, this could increase the electricity bill amount. The aim of this study is to measure the optimum thickness of Rockwool insulation to experimentally and numerically to reduce the heating load inside the buildings. Two devices have been used through this research, Infrared Thermometer to measure profile temperature of the walls along with VELOCICALC to measure the air temperature and air velocity. Three different layers of Rockwool insulation have been applied on the roof of wooden room. The data present the two layers thickness of Rockwool is the best selection to reduce the heating load inside the room, the differential between outside and inside is 0.9 °C, the Rockwool of one layer reduced only 0.5 °C and the maximum thickness with three layers reduced only 1 °C, which is not much effective compared to the two layers but even more costly. CFD analysis shows agreement with the experimental result. The results shows if the dimensions of a UCSI lecture room is to be considered, then applying Rockwool insulation with a thickness of 100 mm would cost around RM 1520 as a UCSI lecture room is of 8 m width and 9 m length. However, two layers of Rock wool insulation could save around 29.30% of ROI per annum.

The amount of carbon emission pumped into the atmosphere has led to a rise in global temperature. Rapid urbanization increased the use of air conditioners, resulting in the urban heat island effect. The use of environmentally friendly methods in reducing energy consumption for buildings is needed now more than ever. This study aims to evaluate the cooling load of a prototype by installing a shading plate above its roof at a height of 0.67m. A wooden panel with an attached aluminium sheet is used as a shading plate, 2m by 0.9m. The prototype with a dimension of 0.80m (L) x 0.50m (W) x 0.97m (H) is a scaled-down model of the guardhouse located near Block E, UCSI University. Along with the shading plate, the prototype is placed nearby the guardhouse to validate the actual guardhouse's exact condition. The shadow acts as an insulator to the prototype. There were two devices used for data collection; a VELOCICALC thermometer to measure the air velocity and air temperature and an infrared thermometer to measure the profile temperature of the room walls, roof, and floor. To ensure the prototype is adequately ventilated, it was placed 20 cm above the floor using red bricks from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m, a maximum temperature reduction of 4.5°C when the shading plate thoroughly shades the room. A total of 14.5% electricity cost can be reduced monthly when the guardhouse is fully shaded from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. In contrast, both the actual guardhouse and the prototype model can receive full sunlight from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., while from early morning till 11 a.m., the guardhouse is fully shaded by the UCSI Block E building.

PID (proportional+integral+derivative) controller is well known as a simple and easy-to-implement controller. However, the design procedure is not straightforward for multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems. It is even more complicated when robustness criterion must be handled. In this paper, a stable robust PID controller for anti-swing control of automatic gantry crane is proposed. The proposed method employs an automatic tuning using DE (differential evolution) to search for a set of PID controller gains that satisfy Kharitonovs polynomials robust stability criterion. This robust stability criterion is used to deal with parametric uncertainty occurs in gantry crane model. The simulation results show that a satisfactory robust PID control performance can be achieved. The PID controller is able to quickly move the cart of the crane while suppressing the swing of the payload for various conditions, i.e. payload mass and cable length variations.