• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.25 no.5
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• pp.114-126
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• 2021

This paper compared bridge maintenance in United Stated, United Kingdom, Japan, and Korea. Bridges play an essential role in transportation network and in the economic production process. To provide a desirable level of service to the public within limited budgets, it is required to provide effective bridge maintenance activities (e.g. inspection and repair/rehabilitation) at acceptable level of bridge service. A number of bridges are expected to age rapidly in Korea, which will be the excess burden of government. Since several countries have experienced a number of deteriorated bridges because of aging, the countries aforementioned in this study have already developed comprehensive bridge maintenance programs such as inspection practice and repair/rehabilitation techniques. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to synthesize and to compare useful knowledge on bridge maintenance and bridge crack repair/restoration of deteriorated concrete bridge in the four countries. Finally, recommendations that will serve as guidance to transportation agencies for potential enhancements to bridge maintenance and bridge repairs are presented.

• Journal of Korean Tunnelling and Underground Space Association
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.253-263
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• 2021

Concrete structures are damaged by aging and external environmental factors. This type of damage is to appear in the form of cracks, to proceed in the form of spalling. Such concrete damage can act as the main cause of reducing the original design bearing capacity of the structure, and negatively affect the stability of the structure. If such damage continues, it may lead to a safety accident in the future, thus proper repair and reinforcement are required. To this end, an accurate and objective condition inspection of the structure must be performed, and for this inspection, a sensor technology capable of detecting damage area is required. For this reason, we propose a deep learning-based image processing algorithm that can detect spalling. To develop this, 298 spalling images were obtained, of which 253 images were used for training, and the remaining 45 images were used for testing. In addition, an improved loss function and data augmentation technique were applied to improve the detection performance. As a result, the detection performance of concrete spalling showed a mean intersection over union of 80.19%. In conclusion, we developed an algorithm to detect concrete spalling through a deep learning-based image processing technique, with an improved loss function and data augmentation technique. This technology is expected to be utilized for accurate inspection and diagnosis of structures in the future.

• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.51 no.5
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• pp.613-632
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• 2016

The recent diagnosis of the Anthropocene challenges public understanding of nature as a pure and singular entity removed from society, as the diagnosis confirms the earth-changing force of humans. In geography, the nature-society divide has been critically interrogated long before the diagnosis of the Anthropocene, developing several ways of theorizing nature-society relations. This paper introduces a new frontier for such theoretical endeavors: more-than-human geography. Inspired by the material and performative turn in geography and the social sciences around the 2000s, more-than-human geographers have sought to re-engage with the livingness of the world in the study of nature-society relations. Drawing on actor-network theory, non-representational theory (NRT) and vitalism, they have developed innovative ways of thinking about and relating to nature through the key concepts of 'nonhuman agency' and 'affect'. While more-than-human geography has been extensively debated and developed in recent Euro-American scholarship on cultural and economic geography, it has so far received limited attention in Korean geographical studies on nature. This paper aims to address this gap by discussing the key concepts and seminal work of more-than-human geography. I first outline four theoretical strands through which nature-society relations are perceived in geography. I then offer an overview of more-than-human geography, discussing its theoretical foundations and considering ontologies, epistemologies, politics and ethics associated with nature-society relations. Then, I compare more-than-human geography with political ecology, which is the mainstream critical approach in contemporary environmental social sciences. I would argue that more-than-human geography further challenges and develops political ecology through its heightened attention to the affective capacity of nonhumans and the methodological ethos of doing a careful political ecology. I conclude by reflecting on the implications of more-than-human geography for Korean studies on nature-society relations.

• Geophysics and Geophysical Exploration
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.1-10
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• 2016

The hypocenter distribution of microseismic events generated by hydraulic fracturing for shale gas development provides essential information for understanding characteristics of fracture network. In this study, we evaluate how inaccurate velocity models influence the inversion results of two widely used location programs, hypoellipse and hypoDD, which are developed based on an iterative linear inversion. We assume that 98 stations are densely located inside the circle with a radius of 4 km and 5 artificial hypocenter sets (S0 ~ S4) are located from the center of the network to the south with 1 km interval. Each hypocenter set contains 25 events placed on the plane. To quantify accuracies of the inversion results, we defined 6 parameters: difference between average hypocenters of assumed and inverted locations, $d_1$; ratio of assumed and inverted areas estimated by hypocenters, r; difference between dip of the reference plane and the best fitting plane for determined hypocenters, ${\theta}$; difference between strike of the reference plane and the best fitting plane for determined hypocenters, ${\phi}$; root-mean-square distance between hypocenters and the best fitting plane, $d_2$; root-mean-square error in horizontal direction on the best fitting plane, $d_3$. Synthetic travel times are calculated for the reference model having 1D layered structure and the inaccurate velocity model for the inversion is constructed by using normal distribution with standard deviations of 0.1, 0.2, and 0.3 km/s, respectively, with respect to the reference model. The parameters $d_1$, r, ${\theta}$, and $d_2$ show positive correlation with the level of velocity perturbations, but the others are not sensitive to the perturbations except S4, which is located at the outer boundary of the network. In cases of S0, S1, S2, and S3, hypoellipse and hypoDD provide similar results for $d_1$. However, for other parameters, hypoDD shows much better results and errors of locations can be reduced by about several meters regardless of the level of perturbations. In light of the purpose to understand the characteristics of hydraulic fracturing, $1{\sigma}$ error of velocity structure should be under 0.2 km/s in hypoellipse and 0.3 km/s in hypoDD.