• Title/Summary/Keyword: Natural Channel

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Effects of Pine Needle Extract on Pacemaker Currents in Interstitial Cells of Cajal from the Murine Small Intestine

  • Cheong, Hyeonsook;Paudyal, Dilli Parasad;Jun, Jae Yeoul;Yeum, Cheol Ho;Yoon, Pyung Jin;Park, Chan Guk;Kim, Man Yoo;So, Insuk;Kim, Ki Whan;Choi, Seok
    • Molecules and Cells
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    • v.20 no.2
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    • pp.235-240
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    • 2005
  • Extracts of pine needles (Pinus densiflora Sieb. et Zucc.) have diverse physiological and pharmacological actions. In this study we show that pine needle extract alters pacemaker currents in interstitial cells of Cajal (ICC) by modulating ATP-sensitive $K^+$ channels and that this effect is mediated by prostaglandins. In whole cell patches at $30^{\circ}C$, ICC generated spontaneous pacemaker potentials in the current clamp mode (I = 0), and inward currents (pacemaker currents) in the voltage clamp mode at a holding potential of -70 mV. Pine needle extract hyperpolarized the membrane potential, and in voltage clamp mode decreased both the frequency and amplitude of the pacemaker currents, and increased the resting currents in the outward direction. It also inhibited the pacemaker currents in a dose-dependent manner. Because the effects of pine needle extract on pacemaker currents were the same as those of pinacidil (an ATP-sensitive $K^+$ channel opener) we tested the effect of glibenclamide (an ATP-sensitive $K^+$ channels blocker) on ICC exposed to pine needle extract. The effects of pine needle extract on pacemaker currents were blocked by glibenclamide. To see whether production of prostaglandins (PGs) is involved in the inhibitory effect of pine needle extract on pacemaker currents, we tested the effects of naproxen, a non-selective cyclooxygenase (COX-1 and COX-2) inhibitor, and AH6809, a prostaglandin EP1 and EP2 receptor antagonist. Naproxen and AH6809 blocked the inhibitory effects of pine needle extract on ICC. These results indicate that pine needle extract inhibits the pacemaker currents of ICC by activating ATP-sensitive $K^+$ channels via the production of PGs.

Natural, Nature-based Features (NNbF) - A Comparative Analysis with Nature-based Solutions (NbS) and Assessment of Its Applicability to Korea (자연/자연기반 특징(NNbF) - 자연기반해법(NbS)과 비교분석 및 국내적용성 평가)

  • Hyoseop Woo
    • Ecology and Resilient Infrastructure
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    • v.10 no.2
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    • pp.31-39
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    • 2023
  • NNbF is a newly emerging approach to reduce flood risk in coastal and fluvial areas using natural features or engineered nature-based features with the expectation of co-benefits of provisional, regulating, and socio-cultural services provided by the ecosystem. NNbF is not quite different from existing, related terms based on nature, such as NbS, Eco-DRR, NI, GI, EwN, and BwN, for all these terms include expectation of benefits for human societies by directly utilizing or mimicking nature's ecological functions. If we focus on the comprehensiveness of each term's subject and object, we can say that NbS > NNbF > (Eco-DRR, NI/GI). Among the 18 measures introduced in the NNbF International Guideline in the river and floodplain management category, it was found that measures of wash lands and floodplain restoration, including levee setback/removal and side-channel restoration, seemed to be the most applicable to rivers in Korea. These selected measures could be more effective when river managers purchase riparian lands along river courses by relevant laws for river water-quality protection.

Analysis of Design Parameters for Power Plant Breakwater Channels Using Geotextile Containment (지오텍스타일 컨테인먼트를 활용한 발전소 방파수로 설계인자 분석)

  • Kim, Sung-Hwan;Oh, Young-In
    • Journal of the Korean Geosynthetics Society
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    • v.7 no.3
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    • pp.1-7
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    • 2008
  • The geotextile tube shall be sewen with geotextile longitudinally in the shape of hose and it shall be filled hydraulically through filling ports at the proper intervals to construct structure. Geotextile container shall be sewen after spreading of geotextile on the split barge and sealed shut after the filling soil, and then moved and positioned at the required position. And the geotextile container passes through the bottom of barge by opening split barge and drops to the seabed to form structure. This structure for the ${\bigcirc}{\bigcirc}$ project, UAE and we would propose that geotextile containment for core material of power plant breakwater to be constructed for lower bunds with containers up to -4.0m and do upper parts with the structures of tube up to 0.0m. For the application of proposed geotextile containment, review on stability of breakwaters and design consideration were adopted. The evaluation on stability of geotextile containment was classified by 3 items, internal design consideration for material selection, reviews on stability for individual and global structure. In this research, the geothermal analysis was performed to estimate the geothermal behavior of central breakwater. Central breakwater is located boundary of intake and outfall channel, it is mean that the central breakwater is thermal boundary of intake low temperature sea water and outfall high temperature sea water. Therefore, it is required to be designed a low permeability to ensure no mix of intake and outfall waters.

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Structural Optimization of Heat Dissipating Structure with Forced Convection (강제 대류가 있는 열소산 구조물의 구조최적설계)

  • Yoon, Gil-Ho;Kang, Nam-Cheol
    • Journal of the Korean Society of Propulsion Engineers
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    • v.13 no.1
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    • pp.51-57
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    • 2009
  • In this study, a new topology optimization method is developed to design heat-dissipating structure with forced convection. To cool down electrical devices or mechanical machines, two types of convection models have been widely used: the natural convection model with a large Archimedes number and the forced convection with a small Archimedes number. In these days, lots of engineering application areas such as electrochemical conversion devices (Fuel cell) or rocket propulsion engines adopt the forced convection to dissipate the generated heat. Therefore, to our knowledge, it becomes an important issue to design flow channels inside which the generated heat dissipate. Thus, this paper studies optimal topological designs considering fluid-heat interactions. To consider the effect of the advection in the heat transfer problem, the incompressible Navier-stokes equation is solved. This paper numerically studies the coupling phenomena and presents optimal channel design considering forced convection.

PCL Infiltration into a BCP Scaffold Strut to Improve the Mechanical Strength while Retaining Other Properties

  • Kim, Min-Sung;Kim, Yang-Hee;Park, Ih-Ho;Min, Young-Ki;Seo, Hyung-Seok;Lee, Byong-Taek
    • Korean Journal of Materials Research
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    • v.20 no.6
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    • pp.331-337
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    • 2010
  • A highly porous Biphasic Calcium Phosphate (BCP) scaffold was fabricated by the sponge replica method with a microwave sintering technique. The BCP scaffold had interconnected pores ranging from $80\;{\mu}m$ to $1000\;{\mu}m$, which were similar to natural cancellous bone. To enhance the mechanical properties of the porous scaffold, infiltration of polycaprolactone (PCL) was employed. The microstructure of the BCP scaffold was optimized using various volume percentages of polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) for the infiltration process. PCL successfully infiltrated into the hollow space of the strut formed after the removal of the polymer sponge throughout the degassing and high pressure steps. The microstructure and material properties of the BCP scaffold (i.e., pore size, morphology of infiltrated and coated PCL, compressive strength, and porosity) were evaluated. When a 30 vol% of PMMA was used, the PCL-BCP scaffold showed the highest compressive strength. The compressive strength values of the BCP and PCL-BCP scaffolds were approximately 1.3 and 2MPa, respectively. After the PCL infiltration process, the porosity of the PCL-BCP scaffold decreased slightly to 86%, whereas that of the BCP scaffold was 86%. The number of pores in the $10\;{\mu}m$ to $20\;{\mu}m$ rage, which represent the pore channel inside of the strut, significantly decreased. The in-vitro study confirmed that the PCL-infiltrated BCP scaffold showed comparable cell viability without any cytotoxic behavior.

A Study on the Evaluation of Local Festival Based Upon the Evaluation Factors of the Website (웹사이트 평가지표에 기초한 지역축제 웹사이트 분석)

  • 우찬복
    • Journal of the Economic Geographical Society of Korea
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    • v.6 no.1
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    • pp.193-209
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    • 2003
  • Tourism now stand among the fastest and largest industries in the global economy in the 21 st era, with knowledge information and environment industry. After 1990's, each local government in korea that has been organizing and expanding new and existing festivals, those related locality, natural resources, speciality and ethnic customs. While netizens have increased from the later half of 1990's, the Internet has appeared in it with a main advertizing channel of all industries, especially tourism. Each local county publicizes a local festival and all kind of information while managing its web-site. However, they have lots of difficulties In building local information web sites because of lack of technical and financial resources. This study examined general theories about Internet web sites and local festivals to elicit the previous problems and to suggest the ways to activate local festivals utilizing Internet, based upon analysis of web sites and Internet utilization on local festivals designated by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism as the cultural tour one among local festivals.

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Hetero-core Spliced Fiber Optical Sensing System for an Environment Monitoring (구조물 모니터링을 위한 헤테로 코어형 광센싱 시스템)

  • Kim, Young-Bok;Lee, Kwon-Soon;Watanabe, Kazuhiro;Sasaki, Hiroyuki;Choi, Yong-Woon
    • Journal of Ocean Engineering and Technology
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    • v.21 no.3 s.76
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    • pp.46-51
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    • 2007
  • A multi-purpose environmental monitoring system has been developed as a commercially available standard using the technique of hetero-core spliced fiber optic sensors, for the purposes of monitoring large-scale structures and preserving natural environments. The monitoring system has been tested and evaluated in a possible outdoor condition, in view of the full-scale operation at actual sites to be monitored. Additionally, the developed system in this work conveniently provides us with various options of sensor modules intended for monitoring such physical quantities as displacement, distortion, pressure, binary states, and liquid adhesion. Two channels of optical fiber line were monitored in each channel, three displacement sensor modules were connected in series, in order to examine the performance to a pseudo-cracking experiment in the outdoor situation and to clarify temperature influences an the system, in terms of the coupling of optical connectors and the OTDR stability. The results from the pseudo-cracking experiment agreed with the actual cracks, by means of calculation, based an the detected displacement values and their geometrical arrangement of the used sensor modules. The temperature change, ranging from 10 to $20^{\circ}C$ resulting from the 10-days free running operation, was found to influence the system stability of ${\pm}10{\mu}m$, primarily due to the coupling instability of the used optical connectors. It was found that fusion splicing, rather than the use of connectors, reduced the fluctuation dawn to ${\pm}2{\mu}m$. The specification and performance of various option modules have been demonstrated to show the capability of inspecting various physical quantities by use of the single system, which would be suitable for multi-purpose environmental monitoring.

A Study on the Efficient Operation of VTS in Inchon (인천항 VTS의 효율적인 운영방안에 관한 연구)

  • 김상환;박진수
    • Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Navigation and Port Research Conference
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    • 1998.10b
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    • pp.11-25
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    • 1998
  • Many Countries have made efforts to assist ships navigate accurately , safely and expeditiously for the safety control against increasing marine traffic , in their coastal waters. However, they are exposed in spite of these efforts,to risks of casulaties and marine polluation caused by traffic congestion when ships are navigating through waterways approaches to ports or harbors and in narrow fairways. Therefore, efficient control of VTS in Port is necessary nowadays to provide ships with necessary service , which interacts with shipping and organize the flow of traffic so as to maximize the efficiency of the port or harbor while minimizing the risk of accident and environmental pollution. Even though the navigation condition of ships is very inferior compared to other ports in Korea, such as the big difference between the ebb and flood tide, the frequent fog, the narrow fairway , the density of navigation traffic in Inchon Port is high and transportation quantity of dangerous cargoe increases gradually. In cosideration of the characteristics of natural circumstance and traffic circumstance the VTS established newly in Inchon port have to operate efficiently. The purpose of this study is to help efficient operation of VTS in Inchon port by accomplishing both the literature research and questionnaire survey. Questionnaire survey was read to the VTS personnel in Inchon Port and customer familiar to Inchon Port such as ship navigators, pilots, shipping companies and so on. Most of ship navigators who occupy half of the respondents are Korean Officer who had responded while they were calling at Inchon port. The conclusions and recommendations includes ; First, the service area should be extended over Designated area to provide the vessel with navigational assistance service regarding the information of traffic congestion area, fishing boat and small ship's activities. Second, the types of information service to be offered are ship's movement and weather condition inthe vicinity of the port and state of fairway in the approaching channel to thte fairway. Third, VTS personnel should be upgraded by the on-the-job training and continuous simulation training as well as supplement of the qualified personnel for VTS operation. Fourth , the Harbor Master System to be introduced for safe navigation and efficient port operation.

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Simultaneous Determination of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons and Their Nitro-derivatives in Airborne Particulates by Using Two-dimensional High-performance Liquid Chromatography with On-line Reduction and Fluorescence Detection

  • Boongla, Yaowatat;Orakij, Walaiporn;Nagaoka, Yuuki;Tang, Ning;Hayakawa, Kazuichi;Toriba, Akira
    • Asian Journal of Atmospheric Environment
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    • v.11 no.4
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    • pp.283-299
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    • 2017
  • An analytical method using high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with fluorescence (FL) detection was developed for simultaneously analyzing 10 polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and 18 nitro-derivatives of PAHs (NPAHs). The two-dimensional HPLC system consists of an on-line clean-up and reduction for NPAHs in the 1st dimension, and separation of the PAHs and the reduced NPAHs and their FL detection in the 2nd dimension after column-switching. To identify an ideal clean-up column for removing sample matrix that may interfere with detection of the analytes, the characteristics of 8 reversed-phase columns were evaluated. The nitrophenylethyl (NPE)-bonded silica column was selected because of its shorter elution band and larger retention factors of the analytes due to strong dipole-dipole interactions. The amino-substituted PAHs (reduced NPAHs), PAHs and deuterated internal standards were separated on polymeric octadecyl-bonded silica (ODS) columns and by dual-channel detection within 120 min including clean-up and reduction steps. The limits of detection were 0.1-9.2 pg per injection for PAHs and 0.1-140 pg per injection for NPAHs. For validation, the method was applied to analyze crude extracts of fine particulate matter ($PM_{2.5}$) samples and achieved good analytical precision and accuracy. Moreover, the standard reference material (SRM1649b, urban dust) was analyzed by this method and the observed concentrations of PAHs and NPAHs were similar to those in previous reports. Thus, the method developed here-in has the potential to become a standard HPLC-based method, especially for NPAHs.

An Experimental Study on Combustion Instability Characteristics of Various Fuel-Air Mixing Section Geometry in a Model Dump Shape Combustor (모형 덤프 연소기에서 혼합기 유입구 길이 변화에 따른 연소불안정 특성에 대한 실험적 연구)

  • Kim, Min-Ki;Yoon, Ji-Su;Hwang, Jeong-Jae;Yoon, Young-Bin
    • Proceedings of the Korean Society of Propulsion Engineers Conference
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    • 2011.11a
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    • pp.187-199
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    • 2011
  • The main objective of this study was investigation of natural gas flames in a lean premixed swirl-stabilized dump combustor with an attention focused on the effect of the various fuel-air mixing section geometry on the combustion instability characteristics. The multi-channel dynamic pressure transducers were located on the combustor and inlet mixing section region to observe combustion pressure oscillation and difference phase at each dynamic pressure measurement results. Dynamic pressures were also measured to investigate characteristics of combustion at the same time. The combustor and mixing section length was varied in order to have different acoustic resonance characteristics from 800 to 1800 mm in combustor and 470, 550, 870 mm in mixing section. We observed two dominant instability frequencies in this study. Lower frequencies were obtained at lower equivalence ratio region and it was associated with a fundamental longitudinal mode of combustor length. Higher frequencies were observed in higher equivalence ratio conditions. It was related to secondary longitudinal mode of coupled with the combustor and mixing section. In this instability characteristics, pressure oscillation of mixing section part was larger than pressure oscillation of combustor. As a result, combustion instability was strongly affected by acoustic characteristics of combustor and mixing section geometry.

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