• Clean Technology
• /
• v.26 no.1
• /
• pp.72-78
• /
• 2020

The use of fossil fuel and biogas production causes air pollution and climate change problems. Research endeavors continue to focus on converting methane and carbon dioxide, which are the major causes of climate change, into quality energy sources. In this study, a novel plasma-carbon converter was proposed to convert biogas into high quality gas, which is linked to photovoltaic and wind power and which poses a problem on generating electric power continuously. The characteristics of conversion and gas production were investigated to find a possibility for biogas conversion, involving parametric tests according to the change in the main influence variables, such as O₂/C ratio, total gas feed rate, and CO₂/CH₄ ratio. A higher O₂/C ratio gave higher conversions of methane and carbon dioxide. Total gas feed rate showed maximum conversion at a certain specified value. When CO₂/CH₄ feed ratio was decreased, both conversions increased. As a result, the production of solar fuel by plasma oxidation destruction-carbon material gasification conversion, which was newly suggested in this study, could be known as a possibly useful technology. When O₂/C ratio was 0.8 and CO₂/CH₄ was 0.67 while the total gas supply was at 40 L min^-1 (VHSV = 1.37), the maximum conversions of carbon dioxide and methane were achieved. The results gave the highest production for hydrogen and carbon dioxide which were high-quality fuel.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
• /
• v.18 no.4
• /
• pp.429-438
• /
• 1997

Mechanical valve is one of the most widely used implantable artificial organs of which the reliability is so important that its failure means the death of patient. Therefore early noninvasive detection is essentially required, though mechanical valve failure with thrombosis is the most common. The objective of this paper is to detect the thrombosis formation by spectral analysis and neural network. Using microphone and amplifier, we measured the sound from the mechanical valve which is attached to the pneumatic ventricular assist device. The sound was sampled by A/D converter(DaqBook 100) and the periodogram is the main algorithm for obtaining spectrum. We made the thrombosis models using pellethane and silicon and they are thrombosis model on the valvular disk, around the sewing ring and fibrous tissue growth across the orifice of valve. The performance of the measurment system was tested firstly using 1 KHz sinusoidal wave. The measurement system detected well 1KHz spectrum as expected. The spectrum of normal and 5 kinds of thrombotic valve were obtained and primary and secondary peak appeared in each spectrum waveform. We find that the secondary peak changes according to the thrombosis model. So to distinguish the secondary peak of normal and thrombotic valve quantatively, 3 layer back propagation neural network, which contains 7, 000 input node, 20 hidden layer and 1 output was employed The trained neural network can distinguish normal and valve with more than 90% probability. As a conclusion, the noninvasive monitoring of implanted mechanical valve is possible by analysing the acoustical spectrum using neural network algorithm and this method will be applied to the performance evaluation of other implantable artificial organs.

• Geophysics and Geophysical Exploration
• /
• v.10 no.3
• /
• pp.203-210
• /
• 2007

As a part of basic studies on monitoring of landslides and slope stability using SP measurements, micro-electric potentials of rock samples were measured accompanied with the rock failure by a uniaxial loading test were measured. The measurement system consists of a 8 channel A/D converter with 24 bit resolution, uniaxial loading tester, strain gages and 4 sets of electrode attached to a rock sample. Rock samples of granite, limestone, and sandstone were tested. Also, mortar samples were tested in order to monitor electric-potentials of a uniform sample. Micro-electric potentials were detected in all saturated samples and the strength of them increased as the loading force increased. Sandstone samples showed the largest strength of micro-electric potential and it followed limestone and granite samples, which indicates a positive relationship with porosity of rocks. The mechanism generating these micro-electric potential can be explained in terms of electro-kinetics. In case of dry samples, micro-electric potential could be observed only in sandstone samples, where piezoelectric effect played main role due to high contents of quartz in sandstone samples. We found that biggest micro-electric potentials were observed at the electrodes near the crack surface of rock samples. This is very encouraging result that SP monitoring can be applied to predicting landsliding or to estimate collapsing position combining with monitoring of acoustic emissions.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
• /
• v.19 no.2
• /
• pp.163-170
• /
• 1998

The ultimate goal of total artificial heart is permanent substitute for a failed heart in a patient without any other therapeutic modality. Until now, infection has been the main problem related to the mechanical circulatory support system. The best way to solve this catastrophic complication and to improve the quality of life of TAH patients in terms of tethering must be implantation of TAH totally. The EH-TAH has been developed in NCVC from 1987 for this purpose. The system consists of an energy converter and pumps, which are designed to be placed in abdomen and pericardial space separately for a good anatomical fit. To evaluate the anatomical fit and hemodynamic performance of the EH-TAH, in vivo test was done. General condition of the animal and hemodynamic status had been stable until the TAH stopped on the 11th pumping day. The estimated cardiac output was about 7.7L/min. The values of mean aortic pressure, left and right atrial pressure were 93$\pm$10, 19$\pm$3 and 15$\pm$4 mmHg, respectively. The correlation coefficient between left and right atrial pressure was 0.96, which represents the dynamic function of the interatrial shunt in controlling left-right imbalance of cardiac output. During pumping days, the temperature on the surface of actuator had been maintained at 39.7$\pm$0.4$^{\circ}C$, less than 1$^{\circ}C$ higher than the rectal temperature. The TAH stopped on the 11th day due to mechanical problems. We concluded that the EH-TAH possessed satisfactory basic performance including anatomic fit and hemodynamic adequacy, although there were several mechanical problems to be solved yet.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
• /
• v.20 no.3
• /
• pp.491-499
• /
• 2019

Recently, there has been increasing demand for power quality in power supply devices. The IEC 61000-3-2 standard requires that the AC / DC power supply for lighting meet the specifications for the power factor (PF) and total waveform distortion (THD). In addition, advanced countries in Europe are regulating the ripple rate as 15 ~ 30% for the flicker phenomenon caused by the change in the amount of foot energy due to the change in current of the output terminal. Therefore, domestic standards and regulations are being updated. This study adopted the Flyback converter to satisfy the PFC standard, and has the circuit first and second insulation function. To reduce the low frequency ripple of the LED current, Flyback, Coupled Inductor, LC parallel resonance filter, LLC resonance filter, and Cuk were simulated by PSIM to mimic each LED driving circuit. A coupled LC resonant circuit with a coupled inductor on the primary side and LC resonance on the secondary side was also proposed for output side ripple reduction.

• Journal of Ocean Engineering and Technology
• /
• v.33 no.2
• /
• pp.168-177
• /
• 2019

KRISO (Korea Research Institute of Ship & Ocean Engineering) started a project to develop the core algorithms for autonomous intervention using an underwater robot in 2017. This paper introduces the development of the robot platform for the core algorithms, which is an ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle) type with one 7-function manipulator. Before the detailed design of the robot platform, the 7E-MINI arm of the ECA Group was selected as the manipulator. It is an electrical type, with a weight of 51 kg in air (30 kg in water) and a full reach of 1.4 m. To design a platform with a small size and light weight to fit in a water tank, the medium-size manipulator was placed on the center of platform, and the structural analysis of the body frame was conducted by ABAQUS. The robot had an IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit), a DVL (Doppler Velocity Log), and a depth sensor for measuring the underwater position and attitude. To control the robot motion, eight thrusters were installed, four for vertical and the rest for horizontal motion. The operation system was composed of an on-board control station and operation S/W. The former included devices such as a 300 VDC power supplier, Fiber-Optic (F/O) to Ethernet communication converter, and main control PC. The latter was developed using an ROS (Robot Operation System) based on Linux. The basic performance of the manufactured robot platform was verified through a water tank test, where the robot was manually operated using a joystick, and the robot motion and attitude variation that resulted from the manipulator movement were closely observed.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.41 no.5
• /
• pp.507-517
• /
• 2022

The PhotoAcoustic Microscopy (PAM) has been proved to be a useful tool for biological and medical applications due to its high spatial and contrast resolution. PAM is based on transmission of laser pulses and reception of PA signals. Since the strength of PA signals is generally low, not only are high-performance optical and acoustic modules required, but high-performance electronics for imaging are also particularly needed for high-quality PAM imaging. Most PAM systems are implemented with a combination of several pieces of equipment commercially available to receive, amplify, enhance, and digitize PA signals. To this end, PAM systems are inevitably bulky and not optimal because general purpose equipment is used. This paper reports a PA signal receiving system recently developed to attain the capability of improved Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) and Contrast to Noise Ratio (CNR) of PAM images; the main module of this system is a low noise, wideband signal receiver that consists of two low-noise amplifiers, two variable gain amplifiers, analog filters, an Analog to Digital Converter (ADC), and control logic. From phantom imaging experiments, it was found that the developed system can improve SNR by 6.7 dB and CNR by 3 dB, compared to a combination of several pieces of commercially available equipment.

• Investigative Magnetic Resonance Imaging
• /
• v.8 no.1
• /
• pp.42-49
• /
• 2004

Purpose : The quantization noise in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) systems is analyzed. The signal-to-quantization noise ratio (SQNR) in the reconstructed image is derived from the level of quantization in the signal in spatial frequency domain. Based on the derived formula, the SQNRs in various main magnetic fields with different receiver systems are evaluated. From the evaluation, the quantization noise could be a major noise source determining overall system signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in high field MRI system. A few methods to reduce the quantization noise are suggested. Materials and methods : In Fourier imaging methods, spin density distribution is encoded by phase and frequency encoding gradients in such a way that it becomes a distribution in the spatial frequency domain. Thus the quantization noise in the spatial frequency domain is expressed in terms of the SQNR in the reconstructed image. The validity of the derived formula is confirmed by experiments and computer simulation. Results : Using the derived formula, the SQNRs in various main magnetic fields with various receiver systems are evaluated. Since the quantization noise is proportional to the signal amplitude, yet it cannot be reduced by simple signal averaging, it could be a serious problem in high field imaging. In many receiver systems employing analog-to-digital converters (ADC) of 16 bits/sample, the quantization noise could be a major noise source limiting overall system SNR, especially in a high field imaging. Conclusion : The field strength of MRI system keeps going higher for functional imaging and spectroscopy. In high field MRI system, signal amplitude becomes larger with more susceptibility effect and wider spectral separation. Since the quantization noise is proportional to the signal amplitude, if the conversion bits of the ADCs in the receiver system are not large enough, the increase of signal amplitude may not be fully utilized for the SNR enhancement due to the increase of the quantization noise. Evaluation of the SQNR for various systems using the formula shows that the quantization noise could be a major noise source limiting overall system SNR, especially in three dimensional imaging in a high field imaging. Oversampling and off-center sampling would be an alternative solution to reduce the quantization noise without replacement of the receiver system.