• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.50 no.4
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• pp.570-581
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• 2018

Recently, a software program has been used in nuclear power plants (NPPs) to digitalize many instrumentation and control systems. To guarantee NPP safety, the reliability of the software used in safetycritical instrumentation and control systems must be quantified and verified with proper test cases and test environment. In this study, a software testing method using a simulation-based software test bed is proposed. The test bed is developed by emulating the microprocessor architecture of the programmable logic controller used in NPP safety-critical applications and capturing its behavior at each machine instruction. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated via a case study. To represent the possible states of software input and the internal variables that contribute to generating a dedicated safety signal, the software test cases are developed in consideration of the digital characteristics of the target system and the plant dynamics. The method provides a practical way to conduct exhaustive software testing, which can prove the software to be error free and minimize the uncertainty in software reliability quantification. Compared with existing testing methods, it can effectively reduce the software testing effort by emulating the programmable logic controller behavior at the machine level.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.7-13
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• 2015

Unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) are getting popular not only as a private usage for the aerial photograph but military usage for the surveillance, reconnaissance and supply missions. For an UAV to successfully achieve these kind of missions, geolocation (localization) must be implied to track an interested target or fly by reference. In this research, we adopted multi-sensor fusion (MSF) algorithm to increase the accuracy of the geolocation and verified the algorithm using two multicopter UAVs. One UAV is equipped with an optical camera, and another UAV is equipped with an optical camera and a laser range finder. Throughout the experiment, we have obtained measurements about a fixed ground target and estimated the target position by a series of coordinate transformations and sequential Kalman filter. The result showed that the MSF has better performance in estimating target location than the case of using single sensor. Moreover, the experimental result implied that multi-sensor geolocation algorithm is able to have further improvements in localization accuracy and feasibility of other complicated applications such as moving target tracking and multiple target tracking.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.3 no.4
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• pp.439-454
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• 2007

In this paper a damage imaging technique using pre-stack migration is developed using Lamb (guided) wave propagation in composite structures for imaging multi damages by both numerical simulations and experimental studies. In particular, the paper focuses on the experimental study using a finite number of sensors for future practical applications. A composite laminate with a surface-mounted linear piezoelectric ceramic (PZT) disk array is illustrated as an example. Two types of damages, one straight-crack damage and two simulated circular-shaped delamination damage, have been studied. First, Mindlin plate theory is used to model Lamb waves propagating in laminates. The group velocities of flexural waves in the composite laminate are also derived from dispersion relations and validated by experiments. Then the pre-stack migration technique is performed by using a two-dimensional explicit finite difference algorithm to back-propagate the scattered energy to the damages and damages are imaged together with the excitation-time imaging conditions. Stacking these images together deduces the resulting image of damages. Both simulations and experimental results show that the pre-stack migration method is a promising method for damage identification in composite structures.

• International Journal of Aeronautical and Space Sciences
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.338-344
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• 2010

This paper discusses the development of the control system of a mini quadrotor in Konkuk University for indoor applications. The attitude control system consists of a stability augmentation system, which acts as the inner loop control, and a modern control approach based on modeling will be implemented as the outer loop. The inner loop control was experimentally satisfied by a proportional-derivative controller; this was used to support the flight test in order to validate the modeling. This paper introduces the mathematical model for the simulation and design of the optimal control on the outer loop control. To perform the experimental tests, basic electronic hardware was developed using simple configurations; a microcontroller used as the embedded controller, a low-cost 100 Hz inertial sensors used for the inertial sensing, infra-red sensors were employed for horizontal ranging, an ultrasonic sensor was used for ground ranging and a high performance propeller system built on an quadrotor airframe was also employed. The results acquired from this compilation of hardware produced an automatic hovering ability of the system with ground control system support for the monitoring and fail-safe system.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.32 no.1
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• pp.97-105
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• 2015

Recently, there have been many researches about applications of origami to mechanical engineering, which realizes a 30 sturcture by folding a 20 plane material. With this simple manufacturing process, origami was even adopted by some roboticists as a way to build an entirely new robot with benefits in terms of cost, weight, and structural simplicity In this paper, we propose a new type of a walking robot based on origami structure. Because all the components of the robot that generate gait motion are mechanically connected, it can actually walk fotward with only a single actuator. We also showed the similarity of gait trajectories between a kinematic analysis and the actual gait motion measured by video tracking. This result proved the possibility of designing an origami-based robot with the identical gait trajectory as we plan.

• International Journal of Aeronautical and Space Sciences
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.1-8
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• 2004

Real-Time Kinematic GPS positioning is widely used for many applications.Resolving ambiguities is the key to precise positioning. Integer ambiguity resolution isthe process of resolving the unknown cycle ambiguities of double difference carrierphase data as integers. Two important issues of resolving are efficiency andreliability. In the conventional search techniques, we generally used chi-squarerandom variables for decision variables. Mathematically, a chi-square random variableis the sum of mutually independent, squared zero-mean unit-variance normal(Gaussian) random variables. With this base knowledge, we can separate decisionvariables to several normal random variables. We showed it with related equationsand conceptual diagrams. With this separation, we can improve the computationalefficiency of the process without losing the needed performance. If we averageseparated normal random variables sequentially, averaged values are also normalrandom variables. So we can use them as decision variables, which prevent from asudden increase of some decision variable. With the method using averaged decisionvalues, we can get the solution more quicklv and more reliably.To verify the performance of our proposed algorithm, we conducted simulations.We used some visual diagrams that are useful for intuitional approach. We analyzedthe performance of the proposed algorithm and compared it to the conventionalmethods.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.225-235
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• 2006

With the discovery in plants of the proteinaceous forisome crystalloid (Knoblauch, et al. 2003), a novel, non-living, ATP-independent biological material became available to the designer of smart materials for advanced actuating and sensing. The in vitro studies of Knoblauch, et al. show that forisomes (2-4 micron wide and 10-40 micron long) can be repeatedly stimulated to contract and expand anisotropically by shifting either the ambient pH or the ambient calcium ion concentration. Because of their unique abilities to develop and reverse strains greater than 20% in time periods less than one second, forisomes have the potential to outperform current smart materials as advanced, biomimetic, multi-functional, smart sensors or actuators. Probing forisome material properties is an immediate need to lay the foundation for synthesizing forisomebased smart materials for health monitoring of structural integrity in civil infrastructure and for aerospace hardware. Microfluidics is a growing, vibrant technology with increasingly diverse applications. Here, we use microfluidics to study the surface interaction between forisome and substrate and the conformational dynamics of forisomes within a confined geometry to lay the foundation for forisome-based smart materials synthesis in controlled and repeatable environment.

• 한국태양에너지학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2011.04a
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• pp.68-73
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• 2011

An experimental study was conducted to investigate the thermal performance of a medium-temperature heat pipe against the charge amount of working fluid. The container and the wick of the heat pipe were made of stainless steel and the working fluid was Dowtherm-A for medium-temperature applications around $250^{\circ}C$. The diameter and length of the heat pipe were 25.4 mm and 1 m, respectively. The maximum thermal load was 1 kW and the working fluid charge ratio varied from 372% to 420%. The results showed that the thermal resistance ranged from 0.12 to $250^{\circ}C/W$ and the effective thermal conductance ranged from 7,703 to $8,898 W/m{\cdot}K$. Dry-out occurred for the heat pipe with 372% fill-charge at the heat load of 950 W, while the other heat pipes with higher charge amount did not encounter dry-out up to 1060 W.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.19 no.10
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• pp.915-920
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• 2013

Payload capacity and transition ability are essential for climbing robots to apply the robots to various applications such as inspection and exploration. This paper presents a new climbing robotic platform with multi-link structure of track-wheel modules to enhance payload capacity and transition ability, and its tracking controller design and experimental results. The compliances between track-wheel modules achieve stable internal and external transitions while the large adhesion area of the track-wheel module enhances the payload capacity of the robot. Kinematic model-based tracking controller is designed and implemented for autonomous internal transition, and the gains of the controller are optimized by experimental design. Experiments on the automatic internal transitions are performed and the results guarantee autonomous internal transition with little tracking error.

• Journal of the Optical Society of Korea
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.415-422
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• 2013

White-light phase-shifting interferometry (WLPSI) is widely recognized as a standard method to measure shapes with high resolution over a long distance. In practical applications, WLPSI, however, is associated with some degree of ambiguity of its phase, which occurs due to a phase delay, which is the offset between the phase of the fringes and the fringe envelope peak position. In this paper, a new algorithm is proposed for the determination of a fringe order suitable for samples in which the phase delay mainly occurs due to noise, diffraction and a steep angle. The concepts of the decouple factor and the connectivity are introduced and a method for calculating the decouple factor and the connectivity is developed. With the phase-unwrapping procedure which considers these values, it is demonstrated that our algorithm determines the correct fringe order. To verify the performance of the algorithm, a simulation was performed with the virtual step height under noise. Some specimens such as step height standard and a column spacer with a steep angle are also measured with a Mirau interference microscope, after which the algorithm is shown to be effective and robust.