Outcome-based Education (OBE) emphasises on two main components in terms of student achievement in an academic programme. One is the Programme Outcomes (POs) which is measured at the point of graduation, and the other, the Programme Educational Objectives (PEOs) is assessed over a longer period of time (around 4-5 years) after graduation. This study focuses on the establishment of a systematic procedure adopted by the Department of Mechanical, Materials and Manufacturing Engineering at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus (UNMC) to formulate PEOs assessment criteria with integration of stakeholders' input, methodology for an unbiased measurement of graduates' long-term attainment rate, as well as analysis and identification of a set of strategies for continuous quality improvement (CQI). These PEOs are mapped using the guidelines set by the Engineering Council to those required by the Engineering Accreditation Council (EAC), Malaysia. The outcome of the mapping exercise was used to formulate an anonymous online questionnaire survey as a measure of the PEOs' attainment. Key outcomes from this study revealed that graduates are broadly satisfied with their achievement in all eight PEOs. Strategies were also proposed to improve the attainment level in four PEOs with relatively lower attainment rate, as part of the CQI process adopted in the department.

Rain impact energy harvesting using piezoelectric energy harvester has gained much attention recently. However, previous works have only considered the effect of single water droplet. In the case of raindrop, water would accumulate on the surface of the energy harvester and form a shallow water layer. This article models the dynamics of a piezoelectric beam, served as a raindrop energy harvester, subjected to water droplet impact with water layer formed on the surface. The impact of water droplet on the tip of the energy harvester is modelled as an impulsive force, and the water layer on the surface of the energy harvester is modelled as an added mass to the energy harvester. An attempt to model the force generated by the water ripple as a distributed load on the piezoelectric beam is presented. Numerical studies have been conducted based upon the proposed mathematical model verified by experimental results. The results showed that the presence of the water layer affects the output voltage and the dominant frequency of the energy harvester. It reveals that the effect of water (or rain) accumulation on the piezoelectric surface should be considered in deriving an optimal operating condition of such energy harvester.

While knowledge of energy security has been thorough and elaborate, understanding energy security within the context of the water-energy-food nexus, where substantial inter-sectoral causes and effects exist, is less established, more so for Malaysia. This paper investigates the impact of two energy scenarios on identified key indicators within the context of the water-energy-food nexus. By utilizing a mixed method of qualitative interview and quantitative system dynamics modelling, representative causal loop diagrams and stock-flow diagrams were constructed to predict and allow for the analysis of behaviors of selected key indicators. Key findings include the importance of allowing a reasonable penetration of 20% renewable energy for the long term, and having a proper consideration for nuclear energy to assist in keeping energy costs low for the mid-term.

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Rain impact energy harvesting has proven to be a feasible and potent source of alternative energy. This paper presents the development of a dynamical model for rain impact energy harvester using a piezoelectric beam in simulated rain environment. Most of the conducted works in literature were based on single droplet impact with fixed height and drop position. The main contribution of this paper is to extend the single droplet impact dynamical model by incorporating random drop sizes and drop positions. In this work, a rain simulator is used to generate artificial rain of different rain rates. Following our previous works, the water accumulation on the piezoelectric beam is modeled using added mass coefficient, and impact coefficient is integrated into the dynamical model to describe the post-impact dynamics of the droplet impact. The stochastic nature of the artificial rain is described using rain rate and drop size distribution. Two random number generators are integrated into the model, which are lognormally and uniformly distributed, to generate random numbers for droplet diameter and drop position respectively. The accuracy of the theoretical model is validated experimentally by considering four different rain rates.