• The Korean Journal of Physiology and Pharmacology
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• v.24 no.6
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• pp.529-543
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• 2020

In contrast to ventricular myocytes, the structural and functional importance of atrial transverse tubules (T-tubules) is not fully understood. Therefore, we investigated the ultrastructure of T-tubules of living rat atrial myocytes in comparison with ventricular myocytes. Nanoscale cell surface imaging by scanning ion conductance microscopy (SICM) was accompanied by confocal imaging of intracellular T-tubule network, and the effect of removal of T-tubules on atrial excitation-contraction coupling (EC-coupling) was observed. By SICM imaging, we classified atrial cell surface into 4 subtypes. About 38% of atrial myocytes had smooth cell surface with no clear T-tubule openings and intracellular T-tubules (smooth-type). In 33% of cells, we found a novel membrane nanostructure running in the direction of cell length and named it 'longitudinal fissures' (LFs-type). Interestingly, T-tubule openings were often found inside the LFs. About 17% of atrial cells resembled ventricular myocytes, but they had smaller T-tubule openings and a lower Z-groove ratio than the ventricle (ventricular-type). The remaining 12% of cells showed a mixed structure of each subtype (mixed-type). The LFs-, ventricular-, and mixed-type had an appreciable amount of reticular form of intracellular T-tubules. Formamide-induced detubulation effectively removed atrial T-tubules, which was confirmed by both confocal images and decreased cell capacitance. However, the LFs remained intact after detubulation. Detubulation reduced action potential duration and L-type Ca²⁺ channel (LTCC) density, and prolonged relaxation time of the myocytes. Taken together, we observed heterogeneity of rat atrial T-tubules and membranous ultrastructure, and the alteration of atrial EC-coupling by disruption of T-tubules.

• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.45 no.6
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• pp.583-596
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• 2012

The revetment is a installed structure on the slope of river bank to protect against flowing. Through the design standards of domestic and overseas, the maximum tractive force is calculated and applied to the average concept on the slope of river bank. In the case of calculating the method of permissible tractive force on the slope of river bank, there is a need to consider soil sliding. In this study, suggested the tractive force formulae by section of adhesion that have 0 < ${\Phi}$ < $90^{\circ}$ slope of river bank and installed an open channel of length of 20 m and 2 m wide for calculating permissible tractive force and hydraulic model experimented with changing discharge. According to the results, the calculated permissible tractive force of section on the slope is the largest due to the significant effects of surface roughness of different revetment materials. In addition, the permissible tractive force increased in the presence of vegetation but has no the effect by vegetation density.

• Proceedings of the SAREK Conference
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• 2006.06a
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• pp.68-73
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• 2006

The present paper deals with an experimental study of boiling heat transfer characteristics of R-290, and is focused on pressure gradient and heat transfer coefficient of the refrigerant flow inside horizontal smooth minichannel with inner diameter of 3.0 mm and length of 2000 mm. The direct heating method applied for supplying heat to the refrigerant where the test tube was uniformly heated by electric current which was applied to the tube wall. The experiments were conducted with R-290 with purity of 99.99% at saturation temperature of 0 to $10^{\circ}C$. The range of mass flux is $50{\sim}250kg/m^2s$ and heat flux is $5{\sim}20kW/m^2$. The heat transfer coefficients of R-290 increases with increasing mass flux and saturation temperature, wherein the effect of mass flux is higher than that of the saturation temperature, whereas the heat flux has a low effect on increasing heat transfer coefficient. The significant effect of mass flux on heat transfer coefficient is shown at high quality, the effect of heat flux on heat transfer coefficient at low quality shows a domination of nucleate boiling contribution. The heat transfer coefficient of the experimental result was compared with six existing heat transfer coefficient correlation. Zang et al.'s correlation(2004) gave the best prediction of heat transfer coefficient.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.27 no.5
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• pp.537-543
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• 2018

Mechanical shear connectors are commonly used to transfer longitudinal shear forces across the steel-concrete interface in composite beams. Steel pipe as a new shear connector is proposed in this research and its performance to achieve composite strength is investigated. Experimental monotonic push-out tests were carried out for this connector. Then, a nonlinear finite element model of the push-out specimens is developed and verified against test results. Further, the finite element model is used to investigate the effects of pipe thickness, length and diameter on the shear strength of the connectors. The ultimate strengths of these connectors are reported and their respective failure modes are discussed. This paper comprises of the push-out tests of ten specimens on this shear connector in both the vertical and horizontal positions in different reinforced concretes. The results of experimental tests are given as load-deformation plots. It is concluded that the use of these connectors is very effective and economical in the medium shear demand range of 150-350 KN. The dominant failure modes observed were either failure of concrete block (crushing and splitting) or shear failure of pipe connector. It is shown that the horizontal pipe is not as effective as vertical pipe shear connector and is not recommended for practical use. It is shown that pipe connectors are more effective in transferring shear forces than channel and stud connectors. Moreover, based on the parametric study, a formula is presented to predict the pipe shear connectors' capacity.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers B
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• v.36 no.5
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• pp.545-551
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• 2012

We investigated the diffusive transport of bupivacaine HCl through the microchannels of microfluidic drug delivery devices. In the biodegradable microfluidic drug delivery devices developed in this research, the drug release rate can be controlled by simply modulating the geometrical parameters of the microchannels, such as the length, number, and cross-sectional area of the microchannels, when the microchannels are used as paths for drug release. However, the hydrophobic nature of a biodegradable polymer, 85/15 poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid), hinders the infiltration of a release medium (phosphate-buffered saline) through the microchannels into the reservoir of a device that contains bupivacaine HCl, at the early stage of drug release. This can have an adverse effect on the early stage release of local analgesic compounds from the device. In this study, microfluidic channels were surface-treated with surfactants such as PEG600 and Tween80, and the effects of the surfactants on the release performance are presented and analyzed.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers
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• v.21 no.9
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• pp.835-843
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• 2008

We have fabricated the source-drain electrodes for OTFTs by screen printing method and manufactured Ag pastes as conductive paste. To obtain excellent conductivity and screen-printability of Ag pastes, the dispersion characteristics of Ag pastes prepared from two types of acryl resins with different molecular structures and Ag powder treated with caprylic acid, triethanol amine and dodecane thiol as surfactant respectively were investigated. The Ag pastes containing Ag powder treated with dodecane thiol having thiol as anchor group or AA4123 with carboxyl group(COOH) of hydrophilic group as binder resin exhibited excellent dispersity. But, Ag pastes(CA-41, TA-41, DT-41) prepared from AA4123 fabricated the insulating layer since the strong interaction between surface of Ag powder and carboxyl group(COOH) of AA4123 interfered with the formation of conduction path among Ag powders. The viscosity behavior of Ag pastes exhibited shear-thinning flow in the high shear rate range and the pastes with bad dispersion characteristic demonstrated higher shear-thinning index than those with good dispersity due to the weak flocculated network structure. The output curve of OTFT device with a channel length of 107 ${\mu}m$ using screen-printed S-D electrodes from DT-30 showed good saturation behavior and no significant contact resistance. And this device exhibited a saturation mobility of $4.0{\times}10^{-3}$ $cm^2/Vs$, on/off current ratio of about $10^5$ and a threshold voltage of about 0.7 V.

• Journal of Plant Biotechnology
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.87-95
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• 2005

The tomato ripening associated membrane protein (TRAMP) (Fray et al., 1994) is a member of the major intrinsic protein (MIP) family, defined as channels facilitating the passage of water and small solutes through membranes. During normal fruit ripening the TRAMP mRNA levels were increased whereas the expression levels of TRAMP in low ethylene ACO1-sense suppressed lines, Nr and rin fruits, were lower than at the breaker stage of wild type fruit. TRAMP mRNA is inhibited by $LaCl_3$, which is an inhibitor of $Ca^{2+}$-stimulated responses, treatment but drought condition did not affect TRAMP expression. The levels of TRAMP mRNA transcripts were substantially higher in the dark treated seedlings and fruits. These suggest that TRAMP function as a water channel may be doubted because of several reasons; no water content was changed during ripening in wild type, antisense and overexpression lines, TRAMP expression under light condition was lower than dark condition and TRAMP expression was not changed in drought condition. Co-suppression plant, 3588 was one of sense suppression lines, which contain CaMV 35S promoter and sense pNY507 cDNA, produced small antisense RNA, approximately 21-25 nucleotides in length, mediated post-transcriptional gene silencing. Therefore, TRAMP expression was inhibited by small antisense and multiple copies might induce gene silencing without any production of double strand RNA. Total seven selected volatile productions, isobutylthiazole, 6-methyl-5-hepten-2-one, hexanal, hexenal methylbutanal, hexenol, and methylbutanol, were highly reduced in sense line whereas total volatile production was increased in TRAMP antisense line. These results suggested TRAMP might change volatile related compounds.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.29 no.7A
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• pp.705-711
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• 2004

We propose novel OCDMA system with the structure of reconfigurable may encoder/decoder(RAE/ RAD), which are able to reallocate the 2-D optical codes to each subscriber and recover the transmitted data at all the receiving nodes. We have first implemented the double hard limiters composed of limiting amplifier(first hard limiter) that maintain a level of the encoded data from receiving node and AND detector(second hard limiter) for detecting the position of the encoded data and recovering the data. With the proposed system, it was successfully implemented to recover a specific channel data out of 16 code-multiplxed channels using FPGA and 4 DFB-LDs having distinct wavelengths. From experimental results, the code length resulted from increasing the number of the simultaneously connected channels has been reduced by using 2-D OCDMA multiplexed in time and wavelength instead of 1-D OCDMA. In addition, bit errors phenomenon on account of deterioration of autocorrelation peak-to-side lobe ratio is enhanced by using the double hard limiters composed of AND detector and limiting amplifiers.

• Journal of the Korean Wood Science and Technology
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• v.38 no.6
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• pp.498-506
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• 2010

To use domestic softwood for structural lumber, appropriate grading system for quality, production and distribution condition of domestic lumber should be prepared. Kim et al. developed an automatic image processing system for grading domestic structural lumber (2009a and b). This study was carried out to investigate optimal image merging conditions for improving performance of image input system which is the key technique of image processing system, developed in the previous paper. To merge digital images of Korean larch lumber, choosing the green channel information of obtained image data showed the most accurate merging performance. As a pre-treatment process, applying Y-derivative Sharr's kernel filter could improve the image merging accuracy, but the effect of camera calibration was imperceptible. The optimal size of template image was verified as 30 pixel widths and 150 pixel heights. When applying the above mentioned conditions, the error length of images was 3.1 mm and the processing time was 9.7 seconds in average.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.47 no.1
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• pp.59-73
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• 2013

The Xiaolan channel super large bridge is unique in style and with greatest span in the world with a total length of 7686.57 m. The main bridge with spans arranged as 100m+220m+100m is a combined structure composed of prestressed concrete V-shape rigid frame and concrete-filled steel tubular flexible arch. First of all, the author compiles APDL command flow program by using the unit birth-death technique and establishes simulation calculation model in the whole construction process. The creep characteristics of concrete are also taken into account. The force ratio of the suspender, arch and beam is discussed. The authors conduct studies on the three-plate webs's rule of shear stress distribution, the box girder's longitudinal bending normal stress on every construction stage, meanwhile the distribution law of longitudinal bending normal stress and transverse bending normal stress of completed bridge's box girder. Results show that, as a new combined bridge, it is featured by: Girder and arch resist forces together; Moment effects of the structure are mainly presented as compressed arch and tensioned girder; The bridge type brings the girder and arch on resisting forces into full play; Great in vertical stiffness and slender in appearance.