• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제51권2호
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• pp.526-532
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• 2019

In this study, an in-house $^{152}Eu$ calibration source was produced from a custom epoxy matrix with a density of ${\rho}=1.14g\;cm^{-3}$, which is chemically stable and durable form after its solidification. The homogeneity of $^{152}Eu$ in matrix was obtained better than 98%. For a Marinelli beaker geometry, an efficiency calibration procedure was applied to a n-type, coaxial, 78.5% relative efficient HPGe detector in the energy range of 121.7-1408.0 keV by using in-house $^{152}Eu$ calibration source. Then the measured efficiencies for Marinelli geometry were compared with the results calculated by MEFFTRAN and ANGLE softwares for the validation. Although MEFFTRAN and ANGLE have two different efficiency transfer algorithms to calculate the efficiencies, they usually need to use a reliable and accurate reference efficiency values as input data. Hence, reference efficiency values were obtained experimentally from a multinuclide standard source for the same detector-Marinelli geometry. In the present source characterization, the corrections required for self-absorption and true coincidence summing effects for $^{152}Eu$ gamma-rays were also obtained for a such close counting geometry condition. The experimental results confirmed the validity of efficiency calculations obtained by MEFFTRAN and ANGLE softwares that are calculation tools.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제53권9호
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• pp.3051-3057
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• 2021

The concrete is considered as an important radiation shielding material employed widely in nuclear reactors, particle accelerators, laboratory hot cells and other different radiation sources. The present research is dedicated to the shielding properties study of the ordinary concrete reinforced with different weight fractions of lead oxide micro/nano particles. Lead oxide particles were fabricated by chemical synthesis method and their properties including the average size, morphological structure, functional groups and thermal properties were characterized by XRD, FESEM-EDS, FTIR and TGA analysis. The gamma ray mass attenuation coefficient of concrete composites has been calculated and measured by means of the Monte Carlo simulation and experimental methods. The simulation process was based on the use of MCNP Monte Carlo code where the mass attenuation coefficient (μ/ρ) has been calculated as a function of different particle sizes and filler weight fractions. The simulation results showed that the employment of the lead oxide filler particles enhances the mass attenuation coefficient of the ordinary concrete, drastically. On the other hand, there are approximately no differences between micro and nano sized particles. The mass attenuation coefficient was increased by increasing the weight fraction of nanoparticles. However, a semi-saturation effect was observed at concentrations more than 10 wt%. The experimental process was based on the fabrication of concrete slabs filled by different weight fractions of nano lead oxide particles. The mass attenuation coefficients of these slabs were determined at different gamma ray energies using ²²Na, ¹³⁷Cs and ⁶⁰Co sources and NaI (Tl) scintillation detector. The experimental results showed that the HVL parameter of the ordinary concrete reinforced with 5 wt% of nano PbO particles was reduced by 64% at 511 keV and 48% at 1332 keV. Reasonable agreement was obtained between simulation and experimental results and showed that the employment of nano PbO particles is more efficient at low gamma energies up to 1Mev. The proposed concrete is less toxic and could be prepared in block form instead of toxic lead blocks.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제53권6호
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• pp.1821-1833
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• 2021

The gas-liquid counter-current flow limitation (CCFL) is closely related to efficient and safety operation of many equipment in industrial cycle. Air-water countercurrent flow experiments were performed in a tube with diameter of 25 mm to understand the triggering mechanism of CCFL. A parallel electrode probe was utilized to measure film thickness whereby the time domain and frequency domain characteristics of liquid film was obtained. The amplitude of the interface wave is small at low liquid flow rate while it becomes large at high liquid flow rate after being disturbed by the airflow. The spectral characteristic curve shows a peak-shaped distribution. The crest exists between 0 and 10 Hz and the amplitude decreases with the frequency increase. The analysis of visual observation and characteristic of film thickness indicate that two flooding mechanisms were identified at low and high liquid flow rate, respectively. At low liquid flow rate, the interfacial waves upward propagation is responsible for the formation of CCFL onset. While flooding at high liquid flow rate takes place as a direct consequence of the liquid bridging in tube due to the turbulent flow pattern. Moreover, it is believed that there is a transition region between the low and high liquid flow rate.

• 아태비즈니스연구
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• 제12권1호
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• pp.151-163
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• 2021

Purpose - The break-even point refers to the point where total profit and total cost coincide, and from this point on, the entrepreneur's decision-making takes a different route. Strategic decisions can be made for more efficient operation and eventually for more likelihood for growth and sustainability if a startup figures out when it recoups the investment and switches to a net profit. Design/methodology/approach - 748 creativity and skill-based sole proprietors in manufacturing industry were examined to demonstrate the effect of the entrepreneur's entrepreneurial experience and education level, the business launch preparation time, or the self-financing on the achievement of break-even point. Findings - While the business launch preparation time lowered the likelihood of reaching a break-even point, self-financing increased the likelihood. As a result of further analysis by subdividing into subgroups according to skill level, only the business launch preparation time was statistically significant in the highly skilled industries. In the low skilled industries, in addition to the business launch preparation time, the CEO's education level and the self-financing were statistically significant. Research implications or Originality - The longer the business launch preparation time, the higher the start-up cost, which increases the burden of initial cost recovery, and the agile response to market changes is thereby delayed, resulting in the business idea losing its appeal. Self-financing not only provides stability and strong motivation for the business operation but also promotes careful spending which contributes to the achievement of break-even point. In particular, it is found that practical experience is more useful than theoretical knowledge in low skilled industries. Due to the limitation of secondary data based on the recollection, the time required to reach a break-even point, percentage of financing sources, etc. may include cognitive errors. In addition, variables are not included that explain the characteristics of creativity and skill-based sole proprietorship, so it is necessary to exercise caution with the actual application.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제54권7호
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• pp.2418-2426
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• 2022

The grouping analysis is a method guided by the Korea Radioactive Waste Agency for efficient analysis of radioactive waste for disposal. In this study, experiments to verify the adequacy of grouping analysis were conducted with radioactive soil, concrete, and dry active waste in similar environments. First, analysis results of the major radionuclide concentrations in individual waste samples were reviewed to evaluate whether wastes from similar environments correspond to a single waste stream. As a result, the soil and concrete waste were identified as a single waste stream because the distribution range of radionuclide concentrations was "within a factor of 10", the range that meet the criterion of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a single waste stream. On the other hand, the dry active waste was judged to correspond to distinct waste streams. Second, after analyzing the composite samples prepared by grouping the individual samples, the population means of the values of "composite sample analysis results/individual sample analysis results" were estimated at a 95% confidence level. The results showed that all evaluation values for soil and concrete waste were within the set reference values (0.1-10) when five-package and ten-package grouping analyses were conducted, verifying the adequacy of the grouping analysis.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제54권2호
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• pp.608-616
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• 2022

Power peaking factors (PPF) is an important parameter for safe and efficient reactor operation. There are several methods to calculate the PPF at TRIGA research reactors such as MCNP and TRIGLAV codes. However, these methods are time-consuming and required high specifications of a computer system. To overcome these limitations, artificial intelligence was introduced for parameter prediction. Previous studies applied the neural network method to predict the PPF, but the publications using the ANFIS method are not well developed yet. In this paper, the prediction of PPF using the ANFIS was conducted. Two input variables, control rod position, and neutron flux were collected while the PPF was calculated using TRIGLAV code as the data output. These input-output datasets were used for ANFIS model generation, training, and testing. In this study, four ANFIS model with two types of input space partitioning methods shows good predictive performances with R² values in the range of 96%-97%, reveals the strong relationship between the predicted and actual PPF values. The RMSE calculated also near zero. From this statistical analysis, it is proven that the ANFIS could predict the PPF accurately and can be used as an alternative method to develop a real-time monitoring system at TRIGA research reactors.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제54권1호
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• pp.36-48
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• 2022

As a valid numerical method to obtain a high-resolution result of a flow field, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) have been widely used to study coolant flow and heat transfer characteristics in fuel rod bundles. However, the time-consuming, iterative calculation of Navier-Stokes equations makes CFD unsuitable for the scenarios that require efficient simulation such as sensitivity analysis and uncertainty quantification. To solve this problem, a reduced-order model (ROM) based on proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) and machine learning (ML) is proposed to simulate the flow field efficiently. Firstly, a validated CFD model to output the flow field data set of the rod bundle is established. Secondly, based on the POD method, the modes and corresponding coefficients of the flow field were extracted. Then, an deep feed-forward neural network, due to its efficiency in approximating arbitrary functions and its ability to handle high-dimensional and strong nonlinear problems, is selected to build a model that maps the non-linear relationship between the mode coefficients and the boundary conditions. A trained surrogate model for modes coefficients prediction is obtained after a certain number of training iterations. Finally, the flow field is reconstructed by combining the product of the POD basis and coefficients. Based on the test dataset, an evaluation of the ROM is carried out. The evaluation results show that the proposed POD-ROM accurately describe the flow status of the fluid field in rod bundles with high resolution in only a few milliseconds.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• 제16권7호
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• pp.2390-2406
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• 2022

Scene text recognition has important application value and attracted the interest of plenty of researchers. At present, many methods have achieved good results, but most of the existing approaches attempt to improve the performance of scene text recognition from the image level. They have a good effect on reading regular scene texts. However, there are still many obstacles to recognizing text on low-quality images such as curved, occlusion, and blur. This exacerbates the difficulty of feature extraction because the image quality is uneven. In addition, the results of model testing are highly dependent on training data, so there is still room for improvement in scene text recognition methods. In this work, we present a natural scene text recognizer to improve the recognition performance from the feature level, which contains feature representation and feature enhancement. In terms of feature representation, we propose an efficient feature extractor combined with Representative Batch Normalization and ResNet. It reduces the dependence of the model on training data and improves the feature representation ability of different instances. In terms of feature enhancement, we use a feature enhancement network to expand the receptive field of feature maps, so that feature maps contain rich feature information. Enhanced feature representation capability helps to improve the recognition performance of the model. We conducted experiments on 7 benchmarks, which shows that this method is highly competitive in recognizing both regular and irregular texts. The method achieved top1 recognition accuracy on four benchmarks of IC03, IC13, IC15, and SVTP.

• 수산경영론집
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• 제52권2호
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• pp.1-31
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• 2021

This study is to evaluate the prior economic feasibility of the off-shore fisheries stock enhancement project. The main findings of this study can be summarized as follows: first, offshore fisheries stock enhancement project shall be implemented by dividing them into 1st·2nd·3rd projects for efficient promotion. The 1st·2nd·3rd projects will be conducted in a total of 50 locations (the eastern sea, the western sea, the southern sea, and the jeju sea areas), and the project period per unit will be five years, which will cost 1 trillion won. Second, according to the results of the survey on public awareness, the most consumed marine species in Korea over the past year were analyzed in the order of mackerel, hairtail, squid, yellow corvina, blue crab, and cod. The dominant response to the reason for consuming marine products in Korea was healthy well-being food and safe food. In addition, 67.9% of them have hesitated to purchase offshore fish species over the past year due to high prices, indicating that they are burdened by high prices. On the other hand, 79% of the respondents said that the government's policy was insufficient, according to a survey on whether the government's coastal marine resource creation policy was sufficient. Third, as a result of preliminary economic analysis of offshore fisheries stock enhancement project, the benefit-cost ratio is 4.01, net present price is 1,283.7 billion won, and internal rate of return is 91.7% per year, which means that the economic analysis ensures the feasibility of the projects. The results of this study provide useful information on securing or organizing budgets for offshore fisheries stock enhancement project by securing economic feasibility as a national infrastructure project that increases fishery income and public benefits such as consumption of marine products.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제54권3호
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• pp.1062-1070
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• 2022

In the present communication, pure and stable α-Bismuth Oxide (Bi₂O₃) nanoparticles (NPs) were synthesized by low temperature solution combustion method using urea as a fuel and calcined at 500℃. The synthesized sample was characterized by using powder X-ray Diffraction (PXRD), Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Energy dispersive X-ray analysis (EDAX), Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM), Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) and UV-Visible absorption spectroscopy. The PXRD pattern confirms the formation of mono-clinic, stable and low temperature phase α-Bi₂O₃. The direct optical energy band gap was estimated by using Wood and Tauc's relation which was found to be 2.81 eV. The characterized sample was studied for X-ray/gamma ray shielding properties in the energy range 0.081-1.332 MeV using NaI (Tl) detector and multi channel analyzer (MCA). The measured shielding parameters agrees well with the theory, whereas, slight deviation up to 20% is observed below 356 keV. This deviation is mainly due to the influence of atomic size of the target medium. Furthermore an accurate theory is necessary to explain the interaction of X-ray/gamma ray with the NPs.The present work opens new window to use this facile, economical, efficient, low temperature method to synthesize nanomaterials for X-ray/gamma ray shielding purpose.