Analysis of existing effectiveness and method to enhance the lightning, shielding and earthing protection schemes applied on the Parit Raja’s Telecommunication Tower System

Lightning, one of nature’s most destructive forces, continues to wreck havoc on lives and property especially in today’s electronic environment. It has been shown by field experiences that telecommunication towers are one of the preferential points for direct lightning strike. This is mainly connected with the specific features of their construction where the presence of high telecommunication towers and their topographical location mostly at an open area or at hills. The potential of lightning strike toward communication tower is high. A telecommunication tower located at Parit Raja town was chosen as a case study. The location of the tower is good to channel the coverage toward the community. Unfortunately this tower is very vulnerable to lightning strike and can giving impact to the surrounding buildings located nearby the tower itself such as mosque, petrol pump, post office and the Bank Simpanan National (BSN) bank. This thesis presents work that look at the current protection scheme against the lightning strike and the effect on a telecommunication tower system and the surrounding. Analysis study had been made towards existing protection component or system and their effectiveness in mitigating the lightning strike impact on the Parit Raja tower system. The investigation of the lightning protection system used by the communication tower is sufficient enough to direct the overload voltages of a lightning strike. Also, the analysis on the existing grounding earthing system is able to accommodate and dissipate the surge current to the earth. The method such as rolling sphere and cone protection had been used to identify the safety area on the site due to direct strike. Some suggestions to enhance the tower system protection such as installation external ground bus bar, radial system, and new installation for connection of coaxial cable and underground cable. Overall from this project, the weaknesses of system protection were identified in the tower Parit Raja and the proposal as improvement for the protection scheme in the future

Peer mentoring to secure student placements

Purpose This paper describes a case study where student peer mentors were employed to motivate and assist undergraduates to secure optional professional placement positions. Design/methodology/approach The paper describes the reasons for establishing the project and the recruitment of mentors. It outlines a survey of students who had not undertaken placements the previous year to try to identify the activities that would be most effective on the part of the mentors. It then describes the mentoring that was conducted. The mentors, together with the placement co-coordinator, devised support ranging from one to one mentoring, drop in ‘clinics’, online support through a social network and large group talks. It discusses the results of this work and evaluates the oral and written responses of both mentors and mentees. Findings Those mentees who took part in the mentoring were typically those who were already enthusiastic about placement opportunities. The majority of students did not take advantage of mentoring support either face to face or online. It was found that the mentoring scheme did not significantly affect the proportion of students seeking or securing placements. However, the mentors themselves gained tremendous benefits from the mentoring scheme in particular developing their communication skills and confidence. Research limitations A thorough survey of potential mentees was not carried out after the project to ascertain the reasons for their lack of engagement. Practical implications There are two separate implications of this project: 1) The mentoring scheme was valuable primarily for the mentors and not the mentees and 2) The level of support provided by the University is not the main factor in the low take up of optional placement opportunities. If such learning opportunities are felt to be sufficiently valuable for the student learning experience they need to be compulsory with appropriate support available – a mentoring scheme might then be of far more value to mentees. Originality/value There is very little published concerning the use of mentoring to facilitate work based learning. Furthermore most published work on mentoring is located in the ‘best practice’ school of pedagogical research where it is implicitly assumed that one must report on the success of an intervention. Frequently it is more valuable to examine more unexpected results of an intervention. This paper however shows much greater benefits achieved by the mentors than the mentees

Employability and entrepreneurship embedded in professional placements in the business curriculum

Purpose This paper explains the practice of professional placements in a large UK Business School, grounded in literature and research concerning the relationship between professional experience and employability. It explores possible further developments of this practice into student entrepreneurship. Design The paper outlines the relevant literature and then describes the operation of the scheme in practice. It identifies relevant problems and discusses opportunities for both development and research. Findings Professional experience is of immense value to both students and the organisations that host them. Despite reluctance on the part of some of these two key stakeholders, it has the potential for further expansion in terms of number of students on placement, their location, their experience and integrating placements with entrepreneurship education. Practical implications Organisations may see the benefit of employing students on one year or shorter contracts, Universities not currently offering professional placements within the curriculum to their students may wish to adopt best practice, and those that are already involved may wish to consider the optional/compulsory element of the placement experience in order to address the reticence of many students to secure this experience. The paper suggests solutions to the well established question ‘Can entrepreneurship be taught?’ by investigating the idea of Enterprise Placements. Originality/value This work helps to explain, in a practical way, the opportunities and problems associated with the implementation of a placement scheme in the context of relevant literature

Topological Interactions in Warped Extra Dimensions

Topological interactions will be generated in theories with compact extra dimensions where fermionic chiral zero modes have different localizations. This is the case in many warped extra dimension models where the right-handed top quark is typically localized away from the left-handed one. Using deconstruction techniques, we study the topological interactions in these models. These interactions appear as trilinear and quadrilinear gauge boson couplings in low energy effective theories with three or more sites, as well as in the continuum limit. We derive the form of these interactions for various cases, including examples of Abelian, non-Abelian and product gauge groups of phenomenological interest. The topological interactions provide a window into the more fundamental aspects of these theories and could result in unique signatures at the Large Hadron Collider, some of which we explore.Comment: 40 pages, 10 figures, 2 tables; modifications in the KK parity discussion, final version at JHE

Distribution of endothelial cell protein C/activated protein C receptor (EPCR) during mouse embryo development.

The endothelial cell protein C receptor (EPCR) augments protein C activation by the thrombomodulin.thrombin complex. Deletion of the EPCR gene in mice has been reported to lead to embryonic lethality before embryonic day 10 (E10.0). To identify potential mechanisms responsible for this lethality, we performed an immunohistological analysis of EPCR distribution during mouse embryogenesis. EPCR was detected in the trophoblast giant cells at the feto-maternal boundary from E7.5 and at later time points in the trophoblasts of the placenta, suggesting a role in the haemostatic regulation of the maternal blood that irrigates these surfaces. In the embryo, EPCR was weakly detected in aortic endothelial cells from E13.5. Thereafter, EPCR levels increased in certain large blood vessels endothelial cells suggesting that the specificity of EPCR to large vessels is conferred in utero. However, not until postnatal day 7 did the intensity and distribution of EPCR staining mimic that observed in adult mice

Protein refolding in an oscillatory flow reactor

We demonstrate that an oscillatory flow reactor is a viable reactor for protein refolding via direct dilution. The mixing characteristics of the oscillatory flow reactor are well described and controllable and, importantly, can be scaled-up to process scale without a loss of mixing efficiency. This makes the oscillatory flow reactor an attractive alternative to conventional stirred-tank reactors for process-scale renaturation