• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.193-205
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• 2022

The face stability of shield tunnelling is the most important control index for safety risk management. Based on the reliability of the transparent clay (TC) model test, a series of TC model tests under different buried depth were conducted to investigate the progressive failure mechanism of tunnel face. The support pressure was divided into the rapid descent stage, the slow descent stage and the basically stable stage with company of the local failure and integral failure in the internal of the soil during the failure process. The relationship between the support pressure and the soil movement characteristics of each failure stage was defined. The failure occurred from the soil in front of the tunnel face and propagated as the slip zone and the loose zone. The fitted formulas were proposed for the calculation of the failure process. The failure mode in clay was specified as the basin shape with an inverted trapezoid shape for shallow buried and appeared as the basin shape with a teardrop-like shape in deep case. The implications of these findings could help in the safety risk management of the underground construction.

• Tunnel and Underground Space
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• v.34 no.2
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• pp.104-126
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• 2024

Buffer and backfill play an essential role in isolating high-level radioactive waste and retard the migration of leaked radionuclides in deep geological disposal system. A bentonite mixture, which exhibits a swelling property, is considered for buffer and backfill materials, and excessive groundwater inflow from surrounding rock mass may affect stability and efficiency of their role as an engineered barrier. Therefore, stringent quality control as well as in-situ installation management and inflow water constrol for buffer and backfill are required to ensure the safety of deep disposal facilities. In this study, we analyzed the design requirements of buffer and backfill by examining various laboratory tests and a field study of the Steel Tunnel Test at the Äspö Hard Rock Laboratory in Sweden. We introduced how to control the quality of buffer and backfill construction in-field, and also presented how to handle excessive groundwater inflow into disposal caverns, validating the groundwater retention capacity of bentonite pellets and the effectiveness of geotexile use.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.30 no.6
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• pp.601-612
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• 2022

The prediction of structural mechanical behaviors is vital important to early perceive the abnormal conditions and avoid the occurrence of disasters. Especially for underground engineering, complex geological conditions make the structure more prone to disasters. Aiming at solving the problems existing in previous studies, such as incomplete consideration factors and can only predict the continuous performance, the deep attention fused temporal convolution network (DATCN) is proposed in this paper to predict the spatial mechanical behaviors of structure, which integrates both the temporal effect and spatial effect and realize the cross-time prediction. The temporal convolution network (TCN) and self-attention mechanism are employed to learn the temporal correlation of each monitoring point and the spatial correlation among different points, respectively. Then, the predicted result obtained from DATCN is compared with that obtained from some classical baselines, including SVR, LR, MLP, and RNNs. Also, the parameters involved in DATCN are discussed to optimize the prediction ability. The prediction result demonstrates that the proposed DATCN model outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines. The prediction accuracy of DATCN model after 24 hours reaches 90 percent. Also, the performance in last 14 hours plays a domain role to predict the short-term behaviors of the structure. As a study case, the proposed model is applied in an underwater shield tunnel to predict the stress variation of concrete segments in space.

• Journal of Acupuncture Research
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• v.36 no.2
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• pp.100-106
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• 2019

Background: In Korean medicine, carpal tunnel syndrome is treated by stimulating the acupoints around the wrist. Although a deep understanding of anatomy and guidance is needed to stimulate these acupoints to avoid undesirable side-effects, currently there are no published guidelines for acupotomy treatment. The aim of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness and safety of fluoroscopy-guided acupotomy compared with conventional acupotomy treatment. Methods: This is a randomized, patient-assessor, patient blind, parallel clinical trial. A total of 30 patients will be enrolled at Wonkwang University Gwangju Hospital, and will be allocated to either an experimental group or a control group. The experimental group will be treated using fluoroscopy-guided acupotomy and the control group will be treated using the conventional acupotomy method. Results: The primary outcome measure will be identification of a cross-section area of the median nerve measured by ultrasonography, and the secondary outcome measure will be the alleviation of pain measured by the Visual Analogue Scale, improvement in the Nerve Conduction Study, Tinel test, Phalen's test, EuroQol 5-dimension scale, and Boston Carpal Tunnel Questionnaire score. Safety components will be measured by monitoring vital signs, electrocardiographs, blood tests, general chemical tests, urine tests and pregnancy tests. In addition, observations for adverse effects will be performed during the trial. Conclusion: This study will provide a more effective, and less harmful way of treating carpal tunnel syndrome compared with conventional acupotomy. Fluoroscopy-guided acupotomy will help practitioners to be accurate in direction and depth of the needle for treating carpal tunnel syndrome.

• Journal of Korean Tunnelling and Underground Space Association
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.321-328
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• 2010

The study performed an actual fire experiment in order to propose the heat release rate of automobile that is the most basic architectural element for the fire safety design in a tunnel, whose importance has been recognized as the underground traffic tunnels are planned in Korean metropolitan cities. The heat release rate of a van is measured by the large scale calorimeter, in which the law of oxygen consumption is applied, and the fire expansion characteristics in a tunnel by placing two passenger cars nearby one another in the tunnel. As the results, the heat release rate of the van was revealed to be 5.9 MW, and carbon monoxide was emitted 482 ppm at a maximum. In case of two passenger car experiment for the fire expansion characteristics, the adjacent car was ignited about 3 minutes 30 seconds after the fire occurrence, and the complete fire was developed after 15 minutes. The maximum heat release was 9 MW. The results from the actual fire experiment can be an important input data for future quantitative analysis as well as an element applicable to a tunnel disaster preventive equipment design.

• Journal of Korean Tunnelling and Underground Space Association
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.41-56
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• 2017

Recently, the necessity of deep and double-deck tunnels has been grown day by day due to the increase of traffic volume at metropolitans and thus the study on the divergence of those tunnels becomes required. Therefore sensitivity analyses were conducted with FLAC 2D program by selecting ground condition, coefficient of lateral pressure, support pattern, and depth of rock cover as parameters. Ultimately, this study is to find the optimal shape and support method of a diverged section. As the results of this study, it turned out that the box type gave higher stability of the section than arch type unlike the general thought. It can be explained that the arch type has about 30% bigger excavation area than the box type. When the ground conditions are poor, steel pipe grouting reinforcement gives higher stability than rockbolt reinforcement, but its thickness and range do not give a great influence on the stability of the enlarged section.

• Journal of the Korean Geotechnical Society
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• v.40 no.1
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• pp.15-28
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• 2024

This paper proposes a method to acquire image data inside tunnel structures and a method to structure the acquired image data. By improving the conditions by which image data are acquired inside the tunnel structure, high-quality image data can be obtained from area type tunnel scanning. To improve the data acquisition conditions, a longitudinal rail of the tunnel can be installed on the tunnel ceiling, and image data of the entire tunnel structure can be acquired by moving the installed rail. This study identified 0.5 mm cracked simulation lines under a distance condition of 20 m at resolutions of 3,840 × 2,160 and 720 × 480 pixels. In addition, the proposed image-data-structuring method could acquire image data in image tile units. Here, the image data of the tunnel can be structured by substituting the application factors (resolution of the acquired image and the tunnel size) into a relationship equation. In an experiment, the image data of a tunnel with a length of 1,000 m and a width of 20 m were obtained with a minimum overlap rate of 0.02% to 8.36% depending on resolution and precision, and the size of the local coordinate system was found to be (14 × 15) to (36 × 34) pixels.

• Journal of Korean Tunnelling and Underground Space Association
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• v.24 no.6
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• pp.483-494
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• 2022

Owing to the saturation of ground spaces in downtown areas, underground spaces are being developed increasingly. Underground spaces are utilized for transportation, water supply and sewerage, communication zones, electric power zones, and various cultural complexes. In Korea, for excavating underground spaces, blasting methods using gunpowder such as the New Austrian Tunneling Method (NATM) are mainly used. However, the blasting method causes vibration and noise during tunnel excavation, generating many complaints from residents in the vicinity of the excavation site. To address this problem, various methods have been developed, and recently, vibration and noise have been reduced using deep excavation. This study predicts blast vibration changes according to the depth, under the same blasting and tunnel conditions, using numerical analysis based on the blast vibration measurement data of the GTX-A route, the tunnel cross-section drawings, and ground investigation reports. Furthermore, the necessary separation distance from densely populated areas such as residential areas is suggested by analyzing the trend of decreasing blast vibration according to the distance from ground surface directly above the blasting location.

• The Journal of the Institute of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.22 no.5
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• pp.7-15
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• 2022

Since the direct and indirect damage caused by the fire in the underground utility tunnel will cause great damage to society as a whole, it is necessary to make efforts to prevent and control it in advance. The most of the fires that occur in cables are caused by short circuits, earth leakage, ignition due to over-current, overheating of conductor connections, and ignition due to sparks caused by breakdown of insulators. In order to find the cause of fire at an early stage due to the characteristics of the underground utility tunnel and to prevent disasters and safety accidents, we are constantly managing it with a detection system using image analysis and making efforts. Among them, a case of developing a fire detection system using CCTV-based deep learning image analysis technology has been reported. However, CCTV needs to be supplemented because there are blind spots. Therefore, we would like to develop a high-performance acoustic-based deep learning model that can prevent fire by detecting the spark sound before spark occurs. In this study, we propose a method that can collect sound in underground utility tunnel environments using microphone sensor through development and experiment of prototype module. After arranging an acoustic sensor in the underground utility tunnel with a lot of condensation, it verifies whether data can be collected in real time without malfunction.

• Journal of Korean Tunnelling and Underground Space Association
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.657-669
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• 2018

In recent years, the development of complex urban areas has become saturated and much attention has been focused on the development of underground space, and deep excavation is frequently performed in order to increase the utilization of underground space due to the enlargement of buildings and the high rise of buildings. Therefore, in this study, we tried to understand the behavior of the braced wall and the behavior of the tunnel adjacent to the wall according to the stiffness of the wall and the distance between the tunnel and wall. As a result of the study, the deformation of the braced wall tended to decrease with increasing the stiffness of the wall, and the axial force acting on the struts was also different according to the stiffness of braced wall. When the stiffness of the braced wall is small (2 mm), the point at which the axial force of the braces maximizes is near 0.3H of the wall. When the stiffness of the braced wall is large (5 mm), the axial force is maximum at around 0.7H of the wall. Also, the tunnel convergence occurred more clearly when the separation distance from the braced wall was closer, the stiffness of the wall was smaller, and the tunnel convergence was concentrated to the lower right part. The ground settlement due to the excavation of the ground tended to decrease as the distance between tunnel and braced wall was closer to that of the tunnel, which is considered to be influenced by the stiffness of the tunnel.