• Journal of Korean Society of Occupational and Environmental Hygiene
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• v.33 no.3
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• pp.375-383
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• 2023

Objectives: Coal-fired power plants feature diverse working conditions, including multi-layered employment structures and irregular work cycles due to outsourcing and non-standardized tasks. The current uniform occupational environment measurement systems have limitations in accurately assessing and evaluating these varied conditions. This study aims to propose alternative measurement and assessment strategies to supplement existing methods. Methods: Major domestic coal-fired power plants were selected as the study targets. To prepare for the study and establish strategies, work processes were identified and existing occupational environment measurement results were compared and analyzed. The study proceeded by employing three strategies: specific exposure groups (SEGs) measurement, continuous monitoring, and supplementary measurements, which were then compared and discussed. Results: Previous exposure index evaluations (5,268 cases) indicated that crystalline silica, a type of respirable particulate matter, had detection limits below the threshold (non-detectable) in 82.6% (4,349 cases) of instances. Exposures below 10% of the exposure limit were observed at a very low concentration of 96.1%. Similar exposure group measurements yielded results where detection limits were below the threshold in 38.2% of cases, and exposures below 10% of the limit were observed in 70.6%. Continuous monitoring indicated detection limits below the threshold in 12.6% of cases, and exposures below 10% of the limit were observed in 75.6%. Instances requiring active workplace management accounted for more than 30% of cases, with SEGs at 11.8% (four cases), showing a higher proportion compared to 3.0% (four cases) in continuous monitoring. For coal dust, exposures below 10% of the limit were highest in legal measurements at 90.2% (113 cases), followed by 74.0% (91 cases) in continuous monitoring, and 47.0% (16 cases) in SEGs. Instances exceeding 30% were most prevalent in SEGs at 14.7% (five cases), followed by legal measurements at 5.0% (eight cases), and continuous monitoring at 2.4% (three cases). When examining exposure levels through arithmetic means, crystalline silica was found to be 104.7% higher in SEGs at 0.0088 mg/m³ compared to 0.0043 mg/m³ in continuous monitoring. Coal dust measurements were highest in SEGs at 0.1247 mg/m³, followed by 0.1224 mg/m³ in legal measurements, and 0.0935 mg/m³ in continuous monitoring. Conclusions: Strategies involving SEGs measurement and continuous monitoring can enhance measurement reliability in environments with irregular work processes and frequent fluctuations in working conditions, as observed in coal-fired power plants. These strategies reduce the likelihood of omitting or underestimating processes and enhance measurement accuracy. In particular, a significant reduction in detection limits below the threshold for crystalline silica was observed. Supplementary measurements can identify worker exposure characteristics, uncover potential risks in blind spots of management, and provide a complementary method for legal measurements.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.43 no.2
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• pp.225-233
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• 2024

Active sonar transmits sound waves to detect covertly maneuvering underwater objects and detects the signals reflected back from the target. However, in addition to the target's echo, the active sonar's received signal is mixed with seafloor, sea surface reverberation, biological noise, and other noise, making target recognition difficult. Conventional techniques for detecting signals above a threshold not only cause false detections or miss targets depending on the set threshold, but also have the problem of having to set an appropriate threshold for various underwater environments. To overcome this, research has been conducted on automatic calculation of threshold values through techniques such as Constant False Alarm Rate (CFAR) and application of advanced tracking filters and association techniques, but there are limitations in environments where a significant number of detections occur. As deep learning technology has recently developed, efforts have been made to apply it in the field of underwater target detection, but it is very difficult to acquire active sonar data for discriminator learning, so not only is the data rare, but there are only a very small number of targets and a relatively large number of non-targets. There are difficulties due to the imbalance of data. In this paper, the image of the energy distribution of the detection signal is used, and a classifier is learned in a way that takes into account the imbalance of the data to distinguish between targets and non-targets and added to the existing technique. Through the proposed technique, target misclassification was minimized and non-targets were eliminated, making target recognition easier for active sonar operators. And the effectiveness of the proposed technique was verified through sea experiment data obtained in the East Sea.

• Bulletin of the Korean Chemical Society
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• v.32 no.spc8
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• pp.2899-2905
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• 2011

We have demonstrated that TPyPA can be used as an efficient multi-functional material for OLEDs; hole transporting material (HTL), blue and white-light emitter. The device based on TPyPA as the HTL exhibited an external quantum efficiency of 1.7% and a luminance efficiency of 4.2 cd/A; these values are 40% higher than the external quantum efficiency and luminance efficiency of the NPD-based reference device. The device based on TPyPA as a blue-light emitter exhibited an external quantum efficiency of 4.2% and a luminance efficiency of 5.3 $cdA^{-1}$ with CIE coordinates at (0.16, 0.14), the device based on TPyPA as a white-light emitter exhibited an external quantum efficiency of 3.2% and a luminance efficiency of 7.7 $cdA^{-1}$ with CIE coordinates at (0.33, 0.39). Also, TPyPA-based organic solar cell (OSC) exhibited a maximum power conversion efficiency of 0.35%. TPyPA-based organic thin-film transistors (OTFTs) exhibited highly efficient field-effect mobility (${\mu}_{FET}$) of $1.7{\times}10^{-4}cm^2V^{-1}s^{-1}$, a threshold voltage ($V_{th}$) of -15.9 V, and an on/off current ratio of $8.6{\times}10^3$.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SC
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• v.41 no.1
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• pp.41-54
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• 2004

In this paper, we propose a new digital hearing aid circuit that compensates the impaired threshold level changing nonlinearly using a multi-band compensation technique. In the algorithm the hearing frequency range 8kHz is divided into 64 bands which is 125Hz resolution. Each band is controlled finely to compensate the hearing impaired proportional to personal ROM table. The multi-band is introduced using a FFT/IFFT Processor which makes to control in frequency domain. As a result, the proposed circuit is more efficient $15\%$ than a conventional ones such as FIR filter architecture in terms of the compensation gun and accuracy. The hardware size was reduced $65\%$ than a general FFT by pre-handling of the input data.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.38 no.1
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• pp.49-55
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• 2017

The prevalence of obesity has noticeably increased worldwide over several decades with various complication. Even though anti-obesity drug treatments have been spotlighted by resulting in effective mean weight losses, its adverse effects cannot be overlooked. Thus, this study aimed to evaluate the effects of multi-frequency whole body vibration, one of the mechanical stimulus, as a countermeasure against obesity. Thirty-two-6-week-old C57BL/6J male mice were equally assigned to four groups: the Control group (CON, n = 8), the Sham group (Sham, n = 8), the sham with single frequency whole body vibration (S+V, n = 8), and the sham with multi frequency whole body vibration (S+MV, n = 8). After 4 weeks, morphologic changes in the adipose tissue were evaluated from three-dimensional images using in vivo micro-computed tomography. At 4 weeks, the volume of the abdominal adipose tissue, which had the highest value in Sham group, noticeably reduced in S+MV group compared to it in S+V group. These results implied that the accumulation of abdominal adipose tissue can be effectively reduced through applying multi-frequency whole body vibration.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SC
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• v.43 no.6 s.312
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• pp.76-82
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• 2006

In this paper, the biomedical signal compression method, which is combined with the multi-stage vector quantization and wavelet lifting scheme, is proposed. It utilizes the property of wavelet coefficients that give emphasis on approximation coefficients. The transmitted codebook index consists of the code vectors obtained by wavelet lifting coefficients of ECG and error signals from the 1024 block length, respectively. Each codebook is adaptively updated by the method comparing to the distance of input codevectors with candidate codevectors by using an pre-defined threshold value. The proposed compression method showed blow 3% in term of PRD and 276.62 bits/sec in term of CDR.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.47 no.1
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• pp.1-5
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• 2010

In this paper, we directly compare the program efficiency of conventional channel hot electron (CHE) injection methods and a novel hot electron injection methods using substrate forward biases in our silicon-oxide-nitride-oxide-silicon (SONOS) cell. Compared with conventional CHE injection methods, the proposed injection method showed improved program efficiency including faster program operation at lower bias voltages as well as localized trapping features for multi-bit operation with a threshold voltage difference of 1 V at between the forward and reverse read. This program method is expected to be useful and widely applied for future nano-scale multi-bit SONOS memories.

• 전자공학회논문지 IE
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• v.45 no.3
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• pp.27-35
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• 2008

In this paper, we propose a minute signal detection algorithm for a development of optical analyzer, using the non-dispersive infrared method with multi gas filter correlation wheel, that can measure various environmental air-pollution materials (CO, SO2, NOx, etc.) in real-time. The MCT(mercury cadmium telluride) sensor can detect minute signals those show and absorption characteristic of each environmental pollution materials. In the proposed method, a corresponding data of each environmental pollution materials can be separated by an external trigger and threshold values in the measured continuous signals.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.8 no.12
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• pp.4552-4567
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• 2014

A (n,t,n) secret sharing scheme is to share a secret among n group members, where each member also plays a role of a dealer,and any t shares can be used to recover the secret. In this paper, we propose a strong (k,t,n) verifiable multi-secret sharing scheme, where any k out of n participants operate as dealers. The scheme realizes both threshold structure and adversary structure simultaneously, and removes a trusted third party. The secret reconstruction phase is performed using an additive homomorphism for decreasing the storage cost. Meanwhile, the scheme achieves the pre-verification property in the sense that any participant doesn't need to reveal any information about real master shares in the verification phase. We compare our proposal with the previous (n,t,n) secret sharing schemes from the perspectives of what kinds of access structures they achieve, what kinds of functionalities they support and whether heavy storage cost for secret share is required. Then it shows that our scheme takes the following advantages: (a) realizing the adversary structure, (b) allowing any k out of n participants to operate as dealers, (c) small sized secret share. Moreover, our proposed scheme is a favorable candidate to be used in many applications, such as secure multi-party computation and privacy preserving data mining, etc.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2010.02a
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• pp.257-257
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• 2010

One of the critical issues for applications of flexible organic thin film transistors (OTFTs) for flexible electronic systems is the electrical stabilities of the OTFT devices, including variation of the current on/off ratio ($I_{on}/I_{off}$), leakage current, threshold voltage, and hysteresis, under repetitive mechanical deformation. In particular, repetitive mechanical deformation accelerates the degradation of device performance at the ambient environment. In this work, electrical stabilities of the pentacene organic thin film transistors (OTFTs) employing multi-stack hybrid encapsulation layers were investigated under mechanical cyclic bending. Flexible bottom-gated pentacene-based OTFTs fabricated on flexible polyimide substrate with poly-4-vinyl phenol (PVP) dielectric as a gate dielectric were encapsulated by the plasma-deposited organic layer and atomic layer deposited inorganic layer. For cyclic bending experiment of flexible OTFTs, the devices were cyclically bent up to $10^5$ times with 5mm bending radius. In the most of the devices after $10^5$ times of bending cycles, the off-current of the OTFT with no encapsulation layers was quickly increased due to increases in the conductivity of the pentacene caused by doping effects from $O_2$ and $H_2O$ in the atmosphere, which leads to decrease in the $I_{on}/I_{off}$ and increase in the hysteresis. With encapsulation layers, however, the electrical stabilities of the OTFTs were improved significantly. In particular, the OTFTs with multi-stack hybrid encapsulation layer showed the best electrical stabilities up to the bending cycles of $10^5$ times compared to the devices with single organic encapsulation layer. Changes in electrical properties of cyclically bent OTFTs with encapsulation layers will be discussed in detail.