• The Sea:JOURNAL OF THE KOREAN SOCIETY OF OCEANOGRAPHY
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.1-18
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• 2023

The East Sea, one of the regions where the most rapid warming is occurring, is known to have important implications for the response of the ocean to future climate changes because it not only reacts sensitively to climate change but also has a much shorter turnover time (hundreds of years) than the ocean (thousands of years). However, the processes underlying changes in seawater characteristics at the sea's deep and abyssal layers, and meridional overturning circulation have recently been examined only after international cooperative observation programs for the entire sea allowed in-situ data in a necessary resolution and accuracy along with recent improvement in numerical modeling. In this review, previous studies on the physical characteristics of seawater at deeper parts of the East Sea, and meridional overturning circulation are summarized to identify any remaining issues. The seawater below a depth of several hundreds of meters in the East Sea has been identified as the Japan Sea Proper Water (East Sea Proper Water) due to its homogeneous physical properties of a water temperature below 1℃ and practical salinity values ranging from 34.0 to 34.1. However, vertically high-resolution salinity and dissolved oxygen observations since the 1990s enabled us to separate the water into at least three different water masses (central water, CW; deep water, DW; bottom water, BW). Recent studies have shown that the physical characteristics and boundaries between the three water masses are not constant over time, but have significantly varied over the last few decades in association with time-varying water formation processes, such as convection processes (deep slope convection and open-ocean deep convection) that are linked to the re-circulation of the Tsushima Warm Current, ocean-atmosphere heat and freshwater exchanges, and sea-ice formation in the northern part of the East Sea. The CW, DW, and BW were found to be transported horizontally from the Japan Basin to the Ulleung Basin, from the Ulleung Basin to the Yamato Basin, and from the Yamato Basin to the Japan Basin, respectively, rotating counterclockwise with a shallow depth on the right of its path (consistent with the bottom topographic control of fluid in a rotating Earth). This horizontal deep circulation is a part of the sea's meridional overturning circulation that has undergone changes in the path and intensity. Yet, the linkages between upper and deeper circulation and between the horizontal and meridional overturning circulation are not well understood. Through this review, the remaining issues to be addressed in the future were identified. These issues included a connection between the changing properties of CW, DW, and BW, and their horizontal and overturning circulations; the linkage of deep and abyssal circulations to the upper circulation, including upper water transport from and into the Western Pacific Ocean; and processes underlying the temporal variability in the path and intensity of CW, DW, and BW.

• Korean Chemical Engineering Research
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• v.51 no.4
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• pp.506-512
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• 2013

Biomass and low-grade coals are known to be better potential sources of energy compared to crude oil and natural gas since these materials are readily available and found to have large reserves, respectively. Gasification of these carbonaceous materials produced syngas for chemical synthesis and power generation. Woodchip, sawdust and lignite were gasified with steam in a thermobalance reactor under atmospheric pressure in order to evaluate their kinetic rate information. The effects of gasification temperature ($600{\sim}900^{\circ}C$) and partial pressure of steam (20~90 kPa) on the gasification rate were investigated. The three different types of gas-solid reaction models were applied to the experimental data to predict the behavior of the gasification reactions. The modified volumetric model predicted the conversion data well, thus the model was used to evaluate kinetic parameters in this study. The observed activation energy of biomass, sawdust and lignite gasification reactions were found to be in reasonable range and their rank was found to be sawdust > woodchip > lignite. The expression of apparent reaction rates for steam gasification of the three solids was proposed to provide basic information on the design of coal gasification processes.