• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.33 no.7
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• pp.629-636
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• 2009

Mechanical stimulation is known to play a vital role on the differentiation of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) to pre-osteoblasts. In this research, we developed a tensile cell stimulator, composed of a DC motor-driven actuator and LVDT sensor for measuring linear displacement, to study the effects of tensile stress on osteogenic differentiation of MSCs. First, we demonstrated the reliability of this device by showing the uniform strain field in the silicon substrate. Secondly, we investigated the effects of tensile stretching on osteogenic differentiation. We imposed a pre-set cyclic strain at a fixed frequency on cell monolayer cultured on a flexible silicon substrate while varying its amplitude and duration. 60 min of resting period was allowed between 30 min of cyclic stretching and this cycle is repeated up to 7 days. Under the combined stimulation with osteogenic media and mechanical stretching, the osteogenic markers such as alkaline phosphatase (ALP), osterix, and osteopontin began to get expressed as early as 4 days of stimulation, which is much shorter than what is typically required for osteogenic media induced differentiation. Moreover, different markers were induced at different magnitudes of the applied strains. Lastly, for the case of ALP, we observed the antagonistic effects of osteogenic media when combined with mechanical stretching.

• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers C
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• v.53 no.5
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• pp.237-241
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• 2004

Amorphous silicon (a-Si) films are used in a broad range of solar cell, flat panel display, and sensor. Because of the greater ease of deposition and lower processing temperature, thin films are widely used for thin film transistors (TFTs). However, they have lower stability under the exposure of visible light and because of their low field effect mobility ($\mu$$_{FE}$ ) , less than 1 c $m^2$/Vs, they require a driving IC in the external circuits. On the other hand, polycrystalline silicon (poly-Si) thin films have superiority in $\mu$$_{FE}$ and optical stability in comparison to a-Si film. Many researches have been done to obtain high performance poly-Si because conventional methods such as excimer laser annealing, solid phase crystallization and metal induced crystallization have several difficulties to crystallize. In this paper, a new crystallization process using a molybdenum substrate has been proposed. As we use a flexible substrate, high temperature treatment and roll-to-roll process are possible. We have used a high temperature process above 75$0^{\circ}C$ to obtain poly-Si films on molybdenum substrates by a rapid thermal annealing (RTA) of the amorphous silicon (a-Si) layers. The properties of high temperature crystallized poly-Si studied, and poly-Si has been used for the fabrication of TFT. By this method, we are able to achieve high crystal volume fraction as well as high field effect mobility.

• International Journal of Automotive Technology
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.107-117
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• 2005

A distributed hardware-in-the-loop simulation (HILS) platform is developed for designing an automotive engine control system. The HILS equipment consists of a widely used PC and commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) I/O boards instead of a powerful computing system and custom-made I/O boards. The distributed structure of the HILS system supplements the lack of computing power. These features make the HILS equipment more cost-effective and flexible. The HILS uses an automatic code generation extension, REAL-TIME WORKSHOP$^{ (RTW$^{) of MATLAB$^{ tool-chain and RT-LAB$^{, which enables distributed simulation as well as the detection and generation of digital event between simulation time steps. The mean value engine model, which is used in control design phase, is imported into this HILS. The engine model is supplemented with some I/O subsystems and I/O boards to interface actual input and output signals in real-time. The I/O subsystems are designed to imitate real sensor signals with high fidelity as well as to convert the raw data of the I/O boards to the appropriate forms for proper interfaces. A lot of attention is paid to the generation of a precise crank/ earn signal which has the problem of quantization in a conventional fixed time step simulation. The detection of injection! command signal which occurs between simulation time steps are also successfully compensated. In order to prove the feasibility of the proposed environment, a simple PI controller for an air-to-fuel ratio (AFR) control is used. The proposed HILS environment and I/O systems are shown to be an efficient tool to develop various control functions and to validate the software and hardware of the engine control system.

• Journal of Korean Society of Water and Wastewater
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• v.31 no.3
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• pp.197-204
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• 2017

This study was carried out to apply the UAV(Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) coupled with Multispectral sensor for the algae bloom monitoring in river. The study acquired remote sensing data using UAV on the midstream area of Gum River, one of four major rivers in South Korea. Normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) is used for monitoring algae change. This study conducted water sampling and analysis in the field for correlating with NDVI values. Among the samples analyzed, the chlorophyll concentration exhibited strong and significant linear relationships with NDVI, and thus NDVI was chosen for algae bloom index to identify emergence aspect of phytoplankton in river. Aerial remote sensing technology can provide more accurate, flexible, cheaper, and faster monitoring methods of detecting and predicting eutrophication and therefore cyanobacteria bloom in water reservoirs compared to currently used technology. As a result, there was high level of correlation in chlorophyll-a and NDVI. It is expected that when this remote water quality and pollution monitoring technology is applied in the field, it would be able to improve capabilities to deal with the river water quality and pollution at the early stage.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.12 no.11
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• pp.5135-5142
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• 2011

A flexible mechanism is proposed in this paper to improve the dynamic response performance of a traffic flow control system in an urban area. The roads, vehicles, and traffic control systems are all modeled as intelligent systems, wherein a wireless communication network is used as the medium of communication between the vehicles and the roads. The necessary sensor networks are installed in the roads and on the roadside upon which reinforcement learning is adopted as the core algorithm for this mechanism. A traffic policy can be planned online according to the updated situations on the roads, based on all the information from the vehicles and the roads. This improves the flexibility of traffic flow and offers a much more efficient use of the roads over a traditional traffic control system. The optimum intersection signals can be learned automatically online. An intersection control system is studied as an example of the mechanism using Q-learning based algorithm, and simulation results showed that the proposed mechanism can improve the traffic efficiency and the waiting time at the signal light by more than 30% in various conditions compare to the traditional signaling system.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.53 no.2
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• pp.117-122
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• 2016

Recently, the detection of pH with real-time and in vivo has been focal pointed in the environmental or medical fields. In this work, we developed the pH sensor using graphene sheet. Graphene has high biocompatibility. We fabricated flexible solution-gated field-effect transistors (SGFETs) on graphene sheet transferred on the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) substrate to detect pH in electrolyte solution. The gate length was $500{\mu}m$ and the gate width was 8 mm. We evaluated the current-voltage (I-V) transfer characteristics of graphene SGFETs in pH solution. The drain-source current ($I_{DS}$) and the gate-source voltage ($V_{GS}$) curves of graphene SGFETs were depended on pH value. The Dirac point of graphene SGFETs linearly shifted to the positive direction about 19.32 mV/pH depending on the pH value in electrolyte solution.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.11 no.6
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• pp.1062-1068
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• 2007

In order to design and develop a ubiquitous game, it is necessary to develop a natural and flexible interface between the real world and the virtual world, based on social and physical context awareness. We design user interface model and the tactile sensing system that performs virtual interaction and collection of the sensor data. It is sensitive so the collected data should be filtered, rearranged and analyzed. This information is quite different from stylus input, keyboard, button or mouse for interaction. We detect kicked 3D force position of a ball, moment of area, moment of inertia and modified ball shape using tactile sensing system and analyzed data. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach is desirable and robust as well as the results can be used realistic actions and reactions considering attack force and to make interesting environments for ubiquitous game.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.257-280
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• 2014

In this paper, a novel PARAllel FACtor (PARAFAC) decomposition based Blind Source Separation (BSS) algorithm is proposed for modal identification of structures equipped with tuned mass dampers. Tuned mass dampers (TMDs) are extremely effective vibration absorbers in tall flexible structures, but prone to get de-tuned due to accidental changes in structural properties, alteration in operating conditions, and incorrect design forecasts. Presence of closely spaced modes in structures coupled with TMDs renders output-only modal identification difficult. Over the last decade, second-order BSS algorithms have shown significant promise in the area of ambient modal identification. These methods employ joint diagonalization of covariance matrices of measurements to estimate the mixing matrix (mode shape coefficients) and sources (modal responses). Recently, PARAFAC BSS model has evolved as a powerful multi-linear algebra tool for decomposing an $n^{th}$ order tensor into a number of rank-1 tensors. This method is utilized in the context of modal identification in the present study. Covariance matrices of measurements at several lags are used to form a $3^{rd}$ order tensor and then PARAFAC decomposition is employed to obtain the desired number of components, comprising of modal responses and the mixing matrix. The strong uniqueness properties of PARAFAC models enable direct source separation with fine spectral resolution even in cases where the number of sensor observations is less compared to the number of target modes, i.e., the underdetermined case. This capability is exploited to separate closely spaced modes of the TMDs using partial measurements, and subsequently to estimate modal parameters. The proposed method is validated using extensive numerical studies comprising of multi-degree-of-freedom simulation models equipped with TMDs, as well as with an experimental set-up.

• Journal of Advanced Navigation Technology
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• v.22 no.6
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• pp.675-680
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• 2018

In this paper, we propose a hand gesture recognizer using restricted coulomb energy (RCE) neural network, and present hardware implementation results for real-time learning and recognition. Since RCE-NN has a flexible network architecture and real-time learning process with low complexity, it is suitable for hand recognition applications. The 3D number dataset was created using an FPGA-based test platform and the designed hand gesture recognizer showed 98.8% recognition accuracy for the 3D number dataset. The proposed hand gesture recognizer is implemented in Intel-Altera cyclone IV FPGA and confirmed that it can be implemented with 26,702 logic elements and 258Kbit memory. In addition, real-time learning and recognition verification were performed at an operating frequency of 70MHz.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Systems Engineering
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.34-42
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• 2019

Receiving great attention of IoT and 4th industrial revolution, the necessity comes to the fore of the plant system which aims making it smart and effective. Smart Factory is the key realm of IoT to apply with the concept to optimize the entire process and it presents a new and flexible production paradigm based on the collected data from numerous sensors installed in a plant. Especially, the wireless sensor network technology is receiving attention as the key technology of Smart Factory, researches to interface those technology is actively in progress. In addition, IoT devices for plant industry security and high reliable network protocols are under development to cope with high-risk plant facilities. In the meanwhile, Blockchain can support high security and reliability because of the hash and hash algorithm in its core structure and transaction as well as the shared ledger among all nodes and immutability of data. With the reason, this research presents Blockchain as a method to preserve security and reliability of the wireless communication technology. In regard to that, it establishes some of key concepts of the possibility on the blockchain based IoT Edge devices for Plant O&M (Operations and Maintenance), and fulfills performance verification with test devices to present key indicator data such as transaction elapsed time and CPU consumption rate.