Institut Teknologi Brunei was established in 1986. Its inception took place one year after the inauguration of Universiti Brunei Darussalam. Whilst Universiti Brunei Darussalam offered courses at degree level in wide general areas of study, Institute Teknologi Brunei (ITB) specialized in the business, engineering and technological fields at Higher National Diploma or advanced technician level.  The intention was to train highly motivated technicians in certain fields so as to fulfill the ever increasing national technological needs.  ITB began by offering three different Higher National Diploma level (HND) programmes chosen to fulfill the immediate needs of both government and private sectors. These programmes were in Computer Studies, Electrical Engineering, and Business and Finance. ITB was successful in obtaining accreditation by BTEC (British Technical Education Council) for all of these courses thereby ensuring their international recognition.

This study involved the determination of the effects of tide on channel geometry, flow, and sediment transport within the Klang River estuary between 1975 and 1999. Survey data as well as hydraulic modelling using MIKE 11 software were used to determine the interaction between tidal wave, flow and sediment transport in the Klang River estuary. The area of flow in all the section within the study area has the carrying capacity for the design flood ARI100 of 1293m³/s. However results of the study has revealed that Klang River estuary has decreased in carrying capacity by 40% between 1988 and 1993 resulting in the possibility that the carrying capacity for the ARI 100 of 1293 m³/s may not be achievable in some areas along the upstream section. The estuary was found to be well mixed with a low flow regime or sub-critical flow. Bed load was mainly fine silt with median diameter (d50) of between 0.006 mm and 0.007 mm. Water depth was found to be more than 3 m making the estuary suitable for navigation.

High-speed data access has become very important for doctors to take advantage of the wide variety of diagnostic and surgical tools currently available. It is also a great enabler and efficiency enhancer for health service providers. It provides doctors access to vast sources of knowledge and information, which empower them to help patients live happier and healthier. Internet has become a very useful and powerful source of information for the health care sector and there has been a phenomenal increase in doctors and related personnel using it for several purposes like telemedicine etc. The ever-increasing multimedia content such as pictures, video clips and audio has greatly increased the volume of data of medical interest. However, in many parts of the world doctors find accessing data and information from sources including the Internet very slow and often frustrating. Studies have shown that doctors and patients would benefit greatly from speedy, real-time access to medical information. This paper presents possible and feasible schemes for implementing high-speed data access for medical applications. While passive optical networks (PON) capable of delivering very high data rates (gigabits per second) may be contemplated in the long run and with higher investments, it is shown that highly feasible and cost-effective solutions are possible in a shorter time frame by deploying a family of digital subscriber line (DSL) technologies capable of delivering megabits of data over existing copper telephone lines to doctors, hospitals and clinics.

The current commercial automated fingerprint systems available in the market are based on either minutiae or whole image. Both systems suffer from searching time. That is because of using a sequential algorithm in the search, and then they suffer from false acceptance (FAR) and false rejection (FRR) rates. This paper will present a system prototype that uses Adelson Velskii and Landis (AVL) tree searching technique to perform a faster user information retrieval and will avoid errors caused by FAR and FRR. The paper contains our experiment results.

Scholars have been working to scientifically manage the increasing amount of sludge produced by wastewater treatment plants. However, the strict criteria for waste disposal, imposed by the national legislation make the management of sludge more difficult. This is particularly true because of the larger volumes produced and the lack of sites suitable for landfilling or agricultural use within an economical distance. The C/N ratio is often used as an index of compost maturity despite many pitfalls associated with this approach; it seems to be a reliable parameter for following the development of the composting process. In this work the experimental data showed that the C/N ratios in the final composts were 17.6, 18.4, 17.8, 15.9 and 18.1 in the case of experiments T₁, T₂, T₃, T₄ and T₅, respectively. These ratios are considered to be acceptable, where compost T₁ of C/N ratio 17.6, and T₄, with a C/N ratio of 15.9 can be considered to be mature.

A protocol converter is designed to make controlling station that implement HDLC protocol standard be able to communicate with controlled station implement IEC870 protocol standard.
The two protocols are studied to determine the similarities and differences between them. Each application function of the two protocols is modeled using communication finite state machine module and then these modules are verified against error.
Since the two protocols are multifunction protocols, a converter is constructed for each application function. The constructed converters are verified against errors.
Finally, the two protocol converters are designed and implemented using Microsoft visual C++ programming language that operates under Windows environment. The designed software have been tested and worked successfully.

This paper investigates the attitudes and perceptions of one hundred students of two technical colleges in Brunei Darussalam towards English Language Program (ELP). Almost identical program is offered by these two colleges that have entirely different entry-level requirement and award different set of qualifications. The study results indicated that no significant difference was noticed in the students’ skills and learning. However, statistically significant difference existed in attitudes of the students of two colleges. There also exists a relationship between students’ satisfaction with ELP and in their overall attitude and skill as well. Gender and age are found insignificant. Based upon the analysis, conclusion has been made together with some recommendations for further studies.

In this paper, we investigate and compare the performance of various Gray coding M-quadrature amplitude modulation (M-QAM) schemes in uncoded and coded Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (COFDM). Coded OFDM utilizing forward error correction as channel coding is investigated to determine the optimum rate and length of convolutional encoder employing Viterbi decoding algorithm. ¼ rate convolutional coding with length 10 utilizing octal code generator of [1117 1365 1637 1653] outperforms other rates and lengths by at least 3 dB in 64-QAM. In comparison to uncoded OFDM, COFDM performs at least 10 dB better for eg. in 64-QAM to achieve a BER of 10^-3 transmitting 500 subcarriers. Further works is currently ongoing to include adaptive bit loading to ensure efficient bandwidth utilization as well as to formulate a forward error correction code that would reduce the peak to average power ratio commonly found in OFDM transmission.

Climate changes have important implications for the economy of a country. The recent phenomenon of Asian Tsunami and hurricane season has shown that these events can result in devastating damage to both people and property.
The weather changes take place due to ocean and atmosphere interaction, and the two processes of El Nino and La Nina result in substantial changes in climate in various parts of the world. The changes in both temperature and rainfall would affect the people and thus their forecast helps to control and mitigate the effects. This paper examines the weather outlook for Brunei Darussalam in coming months and general consequences for engineering activities.

The aim of this work is to make a feasibility study of the aircraft family concepts using a combined Hybrid Laminar Flow Control Variable Camber Wing (HLFC-VCW) for a high subsonic Advanced Technology Regional Aircraft (ATRA). The prediction of ATRA’s performance used computational fluid dynamic and empirical methods. The aircraft family concept using a combined HLFC–VCW is feasible for ATRA aircraft family from aerodynamic point of view.

This paper focuses on clustering the locations of Indonesian forest fires and visualizing them into a two-dimensional map using a self-organizing map (SOM) algorithm. The input data is based on the quantity of the hot spots of forest fires that spread in several locations within ten months period. We analyze the distributions of the hot spots locations of the regions that may have the high frequencies to risk of the forest fires disaster using the SOM algorithm. We have used a principal component analysis (PCA) to reduce the size of the original datasets in order to improve the accuracy of the clustering results. The SOM algorithm has been used to cluster and visualize the map of the hot spots locations into four groups based on the relative similarity of the risks of forest fires on each of the regions such as danger level, low level, high risks, and low risks. From the analysis we have found that a time period where the highest level of quantity and intensity of the forest fires occurs in some regions can be clearly classified.

Pineapple leaf fibre which is rich in cellulose, relatively inexpensive and abundantly available has the potential to be used as reinforcement for polymer composite. The present study investigated the impact and bending properties of pineapple leaf fibre-polypropylene (PALF-PP) composites as a function of volume fraction. The work of fracture or impact strength of the composites were found to be increased with the increase in fibre content. A comparatively higher impact strength is observed for composite with 2.7 % volume fraction. However, at higher percentages of volume fraction (5.4%, 10.8% and 16.2%) the work of fracture decrease by about 19.2% and then 2.7% of volume fraction. It may be due to the fact that the addition of fibre requires less energy to initiate a crack, void and low interfacial adhesion between fibre and resin. The flexural modulus gives higher value at 2.7% volume fraction. The flexural strength of the composites containing 5.4% volume fraction was found to be higher than that of pure polypropylene resin by 5.1%. Scanning electron microscopic studies were carried out to understand the fibre–matrix adhesion and to study the behaviour of fibre during breakage.

In this article a theoretical one-dimensional model of a super-luminescent light-emitting diode (SLED) is developed. By notionally considering the SLED to be made up of a large number of small sub-sections the photon and carrier densities are calculated using a novel quasi-analytic approach.

The wind wave hindcasting and forecasting plays an important role in the planning of a number of coastal engineering projects as well as for taking safety measures against the extreme events such as hurricanes. A number of numerical models have been developed in recent years, however, the predictions have been more reliable for deep water as compared to finite water depth. Two most important factors that affect wind wave forecasting are non-linear wave interactions and for finite water depth, the bottom friction. Non-linear wave interactions have both positive and negative signature whereas bottom friction is an important sink. Together these bring about significant changes in wave spectrum and hence affect wave forecasting. This paper examines the effect of bottom friction on wave evolution.

 

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