• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.62 no.5
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• pp.657-662
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• 2013

A size-reduced high frequency mixer designed by adopting artificial dielectric substrate is described in this work. The artificial dielectric substrate is composed by stacking the lower substrate in which a lot of metalized via-holes exist, and upper substrate on which microstrip lines are realized. The effective dielectric constant increases due to the inserted lots of via-holes, and this may be applied to size-reduction of high frequency circuits. In this work, in order to present an application example of size-reduction for active high frequency circuits using the artificial dielectric substrate, a 8GHz single gate mixer is miniaturized and measured. It is described that the basic circuit elements for mixers such as hybrid, low pass filter, and matching networks can be replaced by the artificial dielectric substrate for size-reduction. The final mixer has 55% of size compared to the normal one. The measured average conversion gain is around 3dB which is almost similar result as the normal circuit.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.58 no.8
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• pp.1585-1591
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• 2009

This paper describes a new method for extracting characteristic impedance of transmission line using Substrate Integrated Artificial Dielectric (SIAD). The new procedure to calculate the characteristic impedance of SIAD transmission line is described with the proper equations and basic transmission line theory. The characteristic impedance is determined as an almost fixed value in the proposed method, while it fluctuates according to frequency in the previous method. As the result, the effective dielectric constant of SIAD transmission line is calculated as a fixed value rather than fluctuating one. In order to show the validity of the proposed method, SIAD microstrip lines are simulated and measured, and characteristic impedances and effective dielectric constant are calculated and compared to the previous method.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.12 no.7
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• pp.3169-3175
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• 2011

This paper describes the design of size-reduced directional coupler using the artificial dielectric substrate and its increased effective permittivity. Directional couplers are widely used in measuring RF power indirectly and coupling signal power. Artificial dielectric substrates have higher effective dielectric constant than standard dielectric substrate due to the lots of metalized via-holes, and the increased effective permittivity results in size-reduction of circuits. As a design example, 15dB directional couplers are designed on the standard substrate and artificial dielectric substrate and their size are compared. The size of the directional coupler using the artificial dielectric substrate is only 1/3 of that designed using the standard substrate, while the performances are preserved. In addition, the measured performances of the size-reduced coupler are well agreed with the simulated ones. The measured coupling coefficient, matching, and insertion loss at 2GHz are -14.62dB, -24.1dB, and -0.38dB, respectively.

• Electronics and Telecommunications Trends
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• v.34 no.4
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• pp.108-116
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• 2019

Electro-active polymers and dielectric elastomers have many intriguing properties that enable smart interfaces and electrically tunable optical systems, such as haptic feedback devices, artificial muscles, and expansion-tunable optical elements. These device classes are of great interest owing to their promising roles in next-generation technologies including virtual or augmented reality, human sensing and muscular enhancement, and artificial skins. In this report, we review basic principles, current state-of-the-art techniques, and future prospects of electro-active and dielectric elastomer technology. We describe chemical and physical properties of the most promising polymer substances, essential elementary architectures for artificial muscle-like functionalities, and their applications to haptic interfaces, muscular enhancement, and focus-tunable optical elements.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.28 no.11
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• pp.1234-1241
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• 2011

In this work the potential, and the perspectives of the dielectric elastomer actuator are overviewed briefly. As an exemplary work, we introduce a novel contractile artificial muscle actuator based on Synthetic Elastomer(SE). SE is the name of new dielectric elastomer material we have developed and its synthesis procedures and evaluations are described in the first. The contractile artificial muscle actuator is made by stacking the actuator unit one by one along the in thickness direction and finished up by bonding the multi-stacked actuator. Its possibility for the robotic actuator is discussed and demonstrated via experiments.

• Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.578-588
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• 2005

Face robots capable of expressing their emotional status, can be adopted as an efficient tool for friendly communication between the human and the machine. In this paper, we present a face robot actuated with artificial muscle based on dielectric elastomer. By exploiting the properties of dielectric elastomer, it is possible to actuate the covering skin, eyes as well as provide human-like expressivity without employing complicated mechanisms. The robot is driven by seven actuator modules such eye, eyebrow, eyelid, brow, cheek, jaw and neck module corresponding to movements of facial muscles. Although they are only part of the whole set of facial motions, our approach is sufficient to generate six fundamental facial expressions such as surprise, fear, angry, disgust, sadness, and happiness. In the robot, each module communicates with the others via CAN communication protocol and according to the desired emotional expressions, the facial motions are generated by combining the motions of each actuator module. A prototype of the robot has been developed and several experiments have been conducted to validate its feasibility.

• Elastomers and Composites
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• v.56 no.2
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• pp.57-64
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• 2021

This paper reviews recent developments and applications of dielectric elastomers (DEs) and suggests various techniques to improve DE properties. DEs as smart materials are a variety of electro-active polymers (EAPs) that convert electrical energy into mechanical energy and cause a large deformation when a voltage is applied. The dielectric constant, modulus, and dielectric loss of DEs determine the efficiency of deformation. Among these, the dielectric constant significantly affects their performance. Therefore, various recent approaches to improve the dielectric constant are reviewed, including the enhancement of polarization, introduction of microporous structures in the matrix, and introduction of ferroelectric fillers. Furthermore, the basic principles of DEs are examined, as well as their various applications such as actuators, generators, sensors, and artificial muscles.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.397-401
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• 2011

The response of lightning impulse voltage was explored in dielectric liquids employing hydrodynamic modeling with three charge carriers using the finite element method. To understand the physical behavior of discharge phenomena in dielectric liquids, the response of step voltage has been extensively studied recently using numerical techniques. That of lightning impulse voltage, however, has rarely been investigated in technical literature. Therefore, in this paper, we tested impulse response with a tip-sphere electrode which is explained in IEC standard #60897 in detail. Electric field-dependent molecular ionization is a common term for the breakdown process, so two ionization factors were tested and compared for selecting a suitable coefficient with the lightning impulse voltage. To stabilize our numerical setup, the artificial diffusion technique was adopted, and finer mesh segmentation was generated along with the axial axis. We found that the velocity from the numerical result agrees with that from the experimental result on lightning impulse breakdown testing in the literature.

• Journal of the Korean Ceramic Society
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• v.40 no.11
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• pp.1047-1057
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• 2003

A sub-nanometer resolution Scanning Nonlinear Dielectric Microscope (SNDM) was developed for observing ferroelectric polarization. We also demonstrate that the resolution of SNDM is higher than that of a conventional piezo-response imaging. Secondly, we report new SNDM technique detecting higher nonlinear dielectric constants $\varepsilon$$\_$3333/ and $\varepsilon$$\_$33333/. Higher order nonlinear dielectric imaging provides higher lateral and depth resolution. Finally, the formation of artificial small inverted domain is reported to demonstrate that SNDM system is very useful as a nano-domain engineering tool. The nano-size domain dots were successfully formed in LiTaO$_3$ single crystal. This means that we can obtain a very high density ferroelectric data storage with the density above 1T-bits/inch$^2$.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Electromagnetic Engineering and Science
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• v.23 no.5
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• pp.613-623
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• 2012

In this paper, we present an ultra miniaturized voltage tuned oscillator, with HMIC-type amplifier and phase shifter, using LTCC artificial dielectric resonator. ADR which consists of periodic conductor patterns and stacked layers has a smaller size than a dielectric resonator. The design specification of ADR is obtained from the design goal of oscillator. The structure of the ADR with a stacked circular disk type is chosen. The resonance characteristic, physical dimension and stack number are analyzed. For miniaturization of ADRO, the ADR is internally implemented at the upper part of the LTCC substrate and the other circuits, which are amplifier and phase shifter are integrated at the bottom side respectively. The fabricated ADRO has ultra small size of $13{\times}13{\times}3mm^3$ and is a SMT type. The designed ADRO satisfies the open-loop oscillation condition at the design frequency. As a results, the oscillation frequency range is 2.025~2.108 GHz at a tuning voltage of 0~5 V. The phase noise is $-109{\pm}4$ dBc/Hz at 100 kHz offset frequency and the power is $6.8{\pm}0.2$ dBm. The power frequency tuning normalized figure of merit is -30.88 dB.