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This project investigates the possibility of developing scheduling heuristic using bottleneck approach for a three machine flow shop scheduling with the tendency of dominant machine at the first process. Due to the re-entrant and permutation nature of the process routing, the actual bottlenecks were identified as M3 and it utilized makespan algorithms to identify bottleneck categories. Using these conditions, a new bottleneck based heuristic which called BB is developed and tested using Macro Programming in Microsoft Excel. The main objective of this project is to evaluate the performance of M3 bottleneck-based heuristic for M1M2M3 flow shop problems. A total of 3000 simulations were conducted using randomly data in order to evaluate the accuracy of the heuristic. The heuristic performance was evaluated for six and ten job problems. The dominance level groups are divided into levels of weak, medium and strong dominance. For each job problem, the BB results were compared against the results of complete enumeration and lower bound analysis. The results suggested that BB heuristic is very effective in solving scheduling problems within the strong P3 dominance level range. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research was conducted to study the thermal stability of cooking palm oil when subjected to heat in an attempt to study its ability as viscosity index improver. Four samples of mixture of Shell Rimula X SAE 40 engine oil and cooking oil at different compositions were heated over a three-hour cooking period, to provide a time course of changes in mixed oil temperature, vapor temperature, and mass of mixed oil. The significant data change of the temperature and mass over time proposes that the thermally stable cooking oil is a suitable viscosity index improver. The effect of heat on mixed oil temperature, vapor temperature, and mass are evaluated to analyze the reliability of cooking oil as Viscosity Index Improvement (VII) based on thermal stability. The Shell Rimula X SAE 40, after being added with fresh cooking palm oil, is expected to exhibit a stable viscosity-temperature curve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study was conducted to evaluate the comfort level of an air-conditioned classroom at the School of Manufacturing Engineering campus using objective measurement, subjective assessment and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) modeling. CFD software namely FLUENT was used to simulate the comfort parameter such as temperature and air velocity. Corroboration between results from objective measurement, subjective assessment and CFD modeling was conducted. The results obtained showed that measured temperature and relative humidity were within the standard comfort condition by ISO EN7730 (1994) while air velocity exceeded the standard limit by ISO EN7730 (1994). The overall comfort vote, Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) and Predicted Percentage Dissatisfied (PPD) indices shows that occupants are comfortable and satisfied with the classroom comfort level. In addition, some recommendations were made to improve the comfort level and also to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration built up in the classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]