• Journal of Construction Engineering and Project Management
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• v.3 no.4
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• pp.20-25
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• 2013

Variation in construction means modification of design, changes in quality, quantity of work including the alteration of standard of materials or goods to be used in the work and the removal from site any kind of material not in accordance in the contract. In Ghana, Variation order has become major issue in the construction industry. This had resulted in cost overruns, delay and in some contracts dispute, between parties. The aim of this paper was to identify the root causes of variation; effects of variations on projects in Ghana and the means of reducing the impact of variation order. The method of the study involved literature review, primary data collection, interview and closed - ended- questionnaires. Mean Scores Method was used to rank the identified factors causing variation. Analysis Of Variance Test was use to test for the significant difference between means among the professional groups. The study revealed that most causes of variation were change of design by client and inadequate working details. Establishment of oversight project management committee and flow of information were identified as means of controlling variations during project administration.

• Journal of Ocean Engineering and Technology
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.59-65
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• 2011

In structural health monitoring (SHM) using electro-mechanical impedance signatures, it is a critical issue for extremely large structures to extract the best damage diagnosis results, while minimizing unknown environmental effects, including temperature, humidity, and acoustic vibration. If the impedance signatures fluctuate because of these factors, these fluctuations should be eliminated because they might hide the characteristics of the host structural damages. This paper presents a long-term SHM technique under an unknown noisy environment for tidal current power plant structures. The obtained impedance signatures contained significant variations during the measurements, especially in the audio frequency range. To eliminate these variations, a continuous principal component analysis was applied, and the results were compared with the conventional approach using the RMSD (Root Mean Square Deviation) and CC (Cross-correlation Coefficient) damage indices. Finally, it was found that this approach could be effectively used for long-term SHM in noisy environments.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers
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• v.19 no.5
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• pp.1176-1181
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• 1995

Microdrilling is one of the most difficult operations because of the poor chip discharge and the weakness of tool. This study is concerned about the development of a microdrilling monitoring system that is useful for minimizing the tool breakage and enhancing the machinability in the air spindle based microdrilling. The system is composed of a drilling state detection unit and an adaptive step-feed control unit that controls the micro-stepping motor driven spindle axis. Drilling states such as overload, tood breakage are recognized by the change of the air spindle speed which is measured via the reflective photo sensor. Based on the monitoring results, the adaptive step-feed control algorithm adjusts the step increment to keep the decrease of spindle speed within a specified range. The results of evaluation tests have shown that the developed system is very effective to prevent the breakage of microdrill and improves the productivity in comparison with the conventional microdrilling.

• Proceedings of the KSME Conference
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• 2001.06a
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• pp.764-769
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• 2001

Brake-induced vibrations of a vehicle such as brake judder are determined by the excitation of brake torque variations and by their transfer to the driver's contact points via suspension, body and steering system. The formation of brake torque variation is mainly determined by static and dynamic disk thickness variations. The vibration transfer from the excitation by brake torque variation to the perception by the driver depends on the kinematic and dynamic behaviour of the components in the transfer path. Optimization of the judder performance can be achieved either by minimizing the excitation or by reduction of the judder sensitivity of the vehicle. In this paper, the optimization process of a front rotor is suggested to reduce brake judder considering the cooling performance of the rotor, the judder sensitivity of the vehicle and durability of the rotor.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.305-312
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• 2010

The aim of this study is to find an analytic solution to the problem of determining the optimal capacity of a batch-storage network to meet demand for finished products in a system undergoing joint random variations of operating time and batch material loss. The superstructure of the plant considered here consists of a network of serially and/or parallel interlinked batch processes and storage units. The production processes transform a set of feedstock materials into another set of products with constant conversion factors. The final product demand flow is susceptible to joint random variations in the cycle time and batch size. The production processes have also joint random variations in cycle time and product quantity. The spoiled materials are treated through regeneration or waste disposal processes. The objective function of the optimization is minimizing the total cost, which is composed of setup and inventory holding costs as well as the capital costs of constructing processes and storage units. A novel production and inventory analysis the PSW (Periodic Square Wave) model, provides a judicious graphical method to find the upper and lower bounds of random flows. The advantage of this model is that it provides a set of simple analytic solutions while also maintaining a realistic description of the random material flows between processes and storage units; as a consequence of these analytic solutions, the computation burden is significantly reduced. The proposed method has the potential to rapidly provide very useful data on which to base investment decisions during the early plant design stage. It should be of particular use when these decisions must be made in a highly uncertain business environment.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.1646-1654
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• 2015

In this paper, a single-switch ZVZCS quasi-resonant CLL isolated DC-DC converter for driving a low-power (less than 100 W) 32'' LED backlighting liquid crystal display television (LCD TV) is proposed. The proposed converter exhibits both forward and flyback operational characteristics. All semiconductors are activated and deactivated under the soft switching conditions during the switching transition without additional active devices. The switching frequency varies less than about 10 kHz for load variations, leading to minimizing the efficiency reduction under light load. Furthermore, the low di/dt and dv/dt by soft switching enhance the electromagnetic interference (EMI) performance above 1 MHz. A theoretical analysis is described in detail, and a 72-W prototype converter verifies the validity of the analysis.

• Journal of Advanced Marine Engineering and Technology
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• v.27 no.6
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• pp.759-766
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• 2003

The amount of container freight continuously has been increased. and the low efficiency of container crane causes jamming frequently in transportation and cargo handling at port. The conventional control techniques based on a mathematical model are not well suited for dealing with ill-defined and uncertain systems. Recently. Fuzzy control has been successfully applied to a wide variety of practical problems as robots. automatic train operation system. etc. In this paper. a fuzzy controller for container crane is proposed to accomplish a design of improved control system for minimizing the swing motion at destination. In this scheme a mathematical model for the system is obtained in state space form. Finally. to exhibit the tracking performance and robustness of the proposed controller. computer simulations were carried out with various references, parameter variations and disturbances.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Illuminating and Electrical Installation Engineers
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.38-44
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• 2009

This paper presents a new windows application based on 3-D graphics and Text-To-Speech (TTS) for effective management of substation equipment. When problems in a power system occur, inexperienced power system operators may have difficulty in understanding the situation as well as finding suitable countermeasures quickly. This paper addresses an effective scheme to visualizing power system equipment under normal and abnormal conditions using 3-D graphics and animations. In addition, the state variations and the order of maintenance priority of substation equipment are represented by TTS and intuitive methods. The proposed system can help power system operators to more quickly understand the state of power system equipment, and it can provide operators with the suitable countermeasures for minimizing damage caused by equipment problems.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 2005.07d
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• pp.2806-2808
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• 2005

The Controller Area Network (CAN) is being widely used for real-time control application and small-scale distributed computer controller systems. When the stuff bits are generated by bit-stuffing mechanism in the CAN network, it causes jitter including variations in response time and delay. In order to eliminate this jitter, stuff bit must be controlled to minimize the response time and reduce the variation of data transmission time. At first, this paper shows that conventional CAN protocol causes the transmission time delay. Secondly, this paper proposes the method to reduce the stuff bits by restriction of available identifier. Finally, data manipulation method can be reduced the number of stuff-bits in the data field. The proposed restriction method of ID and manipulating data field are pretty useful to the real-time control strategy with respect to performance. These procedures are implemented in local controllers of the ISHURO (Inha Semyung Humanoid Robot).

• 한국정보디스플레이학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2006.08a
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• pp.1243-1246
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• 2006

A new source follower circuit for the integrated circuit of AMLCDs is proposed. Active load is added and calibration operation is applied to compensate the circuits. Proposed circuit is capable of minimizing the variation from both timing and device variations through measured results, the uniformity and bias effect are discussed.