• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.17-24
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• 2008

The aim of this paper is to report our preliminary results of investigating the spatial focalization of Zen-meditation EEG (electroencephalograph) in alpha band (8-13 Hz). For comparison, the study involved two groups of subjects, practitioners (experimental group) and non-practitioners (control group). To extract EEG alpha rhythm, wavelet analysis was applied to multi-channel EEG signals. Normalized alpha-power vectors were then constructed from spatial distribution of alpha powers, that were classified by Fuzzy C-means based algorithm to explore various brain spatial characteristics during meditation (or, at rest). Optimal number of clusters was determined by correlation coefficients of the membership-value vectors of each cluster center. Our results show that, in the experimental group, the incidence of frontal alpha activity varied in accordance with the meditation stage. The results demonstrated three different spatiotemporal modules consisting with three distinctive meditation stages normally recognized by meditation practitioners. The frontal alpha activity in two groups decreased in different ways. Particularly, monotonic decline was observed in the control group, and the experimental group showed increasing results. The phenomenon might imply various mechanisms employed by meditation and relaxation in modulating parietal alpha.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.81 no.5
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• pp.539-550
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• 2022

A detailed experimental program was conducted to investigate the flexural behavior of ultra high performance concrete (UHPC) beams reinforced with high strength steel (HSS) rebars with a specified yield strength of 600 MPa via direct tensile test and monotonic four-point bending test. First, two sets of direct tensile test specimens, with the same reinforcement ratio but different yield strength of reinforcement, were fabricated and tested. Subsequently, six simply supported beams, including two plain UHPC beams and four reinforced UHPC beams, were prepared and tested under four-point bending load. The results showed that the balanced-reinforced UHPC beams reinforced with HSS rebars could improve the ultimate load-bearing capacity, deformation capacity, ductility properties, etc. more effectively owing to interaction between high strength of HSS rebar and strain-hardening characteristic of UHPC. In addition, the UHPC with steel rebars kept strain compatibility prior to the yielding of the steel rebar, further satisfied the plane-section assumption. Most importantly, the crack pattern of the UHPC beam reinforced with HSS rebars was prone to transform from single main crack failure corresponding to the normal-strength steel, to multiple main cracks failure under the condition of balanced-reinforced failure, which validated by the conclusion of direct tensile tests cooperated with acoustic emission (AE) source locating technique as well.