• Transactions of the Korean Society of Automotive Engineers
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• v.12 no.6
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• pp.60-65
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• 2004

Numerical simulations and experiments have been carried out to investigate the effect of fuel injection nozzles on the combustion and NOx formation processes in a medium-speed marine diesel engine. Spray visualization experiment was performed in the constant-volume high-pressure chamber to verify the numerical results on the spray characteristics such as spray angle and spray tip penetration. Time-resolved spray behaviors were captured by high-speed digital camera and analyzed to extract the information on the spray parameters. Spray and combustion phenomena were examined numerically using FIRE code. Wave breakup and Zeldovich models were adopted to describe the atomization characteristics and NOx formation processes. Numerical results were verified with experimental data such as cylinder pressure, heat release rate and NOx emission. Finally, the effects of fuel injection nozzles on the engine performance were investigated numerically to find the optimum nozzle parameters such as fuel injection angle, nozzle hole diameter and number of nozzle holes. From this study, the optimum fuel injection nozzle (nozzle hole diameter, 0.32 mm, number of nozzle holes, 8 and fuel injection angle, $148^{\circ}$) was selected to reduce both the fuel consumption and NOx emission. The reason for this selection could be explained from the highest fuel-air mixing in the early phase of injection due to the longest spray tip penetration and the highest heat release rate after $19^{\circ}$ ATDC due to the increased injection duration.

• Progress in Medical Physics
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.228-236
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• 2004

Retinal ganglion cells transmit visual scene as an action potential to visual cortex through optic nerve. Conventional recording method using single intra- or extra-cellular electrode enables us to understand the response of specific neuron on specific time. Therefore, it is not possible to determine how the nerve impulses in the population of retinal ganglion cells collectively encode the visual stimulus with conventional recording. This requires recording the simultaneous electrical signals of many neurons. Recent advances in multi-electrode recording have brought us closer to understanding how visual information is encoded by population of retinal ganglion cells. We examined how ganglion cells act together to encode a visual scene with multi-electrode array (MEA). With light stimulation (on duration: 2 sec, off duration: 5 sec) generated on a color monitor driven by custom-made software, we isolated three functional types of ganglion cell activities; ON (35.0$\pm$4.4%), OFF (31.4$\pm$1.9%), and ON/OFF cells (34.6$\pm$5.3%) (Total number of retinal pieces = 8). We observed that nearby neurons often fire action potential near synchrony (< 1 ms). And this narrow correlation is seen among cells within a cluster which is made of 6～8 cells. As there are many more synchronized firing patterns than ganglion cells, such a distributed code might allow the retina to compress a large number of distinct visual messages into a small number of ganglion cells.