• Title/Summary/Keyword: Plant Performance

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Effect of Legume Cover Crops and Nitrogen Fertilization Rates on Yield and Nitrogen Use Efficiency of Waxy Corn (Zea mays L.) in No-Tillage System

  • Choi, Jong-Seo;Kim, Min-Tae;Ryu, Jin-Hee;Kim, Kwang Seop;Kim, Sook-Jin;Park, Ki-Do
    • Korean Journal of Soil Science and Fertilizer
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    • v.49 no.5
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    • pp.531-540
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    • 2016
  • The adoption of legume cover crops in no-tillage system can contribute to improve soil fertility by providing several benefits, including reduction in soil erosion, suppression of weed growth and N supply to subsequent crops. We conducted a field study to investigate the effect of cover crops and nitrogen fertilization rates on yield and nitrogen use efficiency of waxy corn (Zea mays L.) in no-tillage upland field. Two legume cover crops, hairy vetch (Vicia villosa Roth) and crimson clover (Trifolium incarnuturn L.) were mechanically terminated with roller in early June. For each cover crop treatment, nitrogen (N) fertilizer was applied at three different rates (145, 72.5 and $0kg\;N\;ha^{-1}$). The growth and yield characteristics of corn were significantly affected by the N fertilization rates in crimson clover plots, which suggest N mineralization from the cover crop residue was not sufficient. In contrast, N fertilization rates had no significant effect on growth and yield of corn in hairy vetch plots, indicating that the amount of N released from the cover crop is large enough to meet most of the N requirement of corn. However, the application of N fertilizer in hairy vetch cover plots resulted in slight increase of crop yield, though not statically significant, and high levels of N concentration in corn plant tissue possibly due to luxury consumption of N. Organic residues on the soil surface in hairy vetch cover plots had substantial amounts of N after harvest, ranging from 100 to $116kg\;N\;ha^{-1}$, which is presumably retained during winter season and released by microbial mineralization in subsequent year. The highest nitrogen yield efficiency was achieved in the plot with hairy vetch cover and no N fertilizer application, followed by the plot with hairy vetch cover and $72.5kg\;N\;ha^{-1}$ fertilization rate. In conclusion, hairy vetch showed better performance in corn productivity as compared with crimson clover. In addition, it was concluded that the application of N fertilizer between 0 and $72.5kg\;N\;ha^{-1}$ in combination with hairy vetch cover crop might be most efficient for corn yield under no-tillage system with climatic and soil characteristics similar to those of the experimental site.

Impact Assessment of Climate Change by Using Cloud Computing (클라우드 컴퓨팅을 이용한 기후변화 영향평가)

  • Kim, Kwang-S.
    • Korean Journal of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology
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    • v.13 no.2
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    • pp.101-108
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    • 2011
  • Climate change could have a pronounced impact on natural and agricultural ecosystems. To assess the impact of climate change, projected climate data have been used as inputs to models. Because such studies are conducted occasionally, it would be useful to employ Cloud computing, which provides multiple instances of operating systems in a virtual environment to do processing on demand without building or maintaining physical computing resources. Furthermore, it would be advantageous to use open source geospatial applications in order to avoid the limitations of proprietary software when Cloud computing is used. As a pilot study, Amazon Web Service ? Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) was used to calculate the number of days with rain in a given month. Daily sets of climate projection data, which were about 70 gigabytes in total, were processed using virtual machines with a customized database transaction application. The application was linked against open source libraries for the climate data and database access. In this approach, it took about 32 hours to process 17 billion rows of record in order to calculate the rain day on a global scale over the next 100 years using ten clients and one server instances. Here I demonstrate that Cloud computing could provide the high level of performance for impact assessment studies of climate change that require considerable amount of data.

Varietal and Yearly Differences of Lignan Contents in Fruits of Collected Lines of Schizandra chinensis Baillon (오미자 수집종별 리그난 함량의 연차간 차이)

  • Kim, Kwan-Su;Park, Chun-Gun;Bang, Jin-Ki
    • Korean Journal of Medicinal Crop Science
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    • v.11 no.1
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    • pp.71-75
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    • 2003
  • To know the varietal difference and yearly changes of lignan contents in the fruits of collected lines of Schizandra chinensis Baillon, three lignan compounds, schizandrin, gomisin A, and gomisin N, were quantitatively analyzed using High Performance liquid Chromatography. The average contents of schizandrin, gomisin A, and gomisin N, showed 0.78%, 0.25%, and 0.63% in the 6-year-old fruits of 24 lines harvested in 1996, and 0.72%, 0.22%, and 0.63% in the 7-year-old ones of 59 lines harvested in 1997. There were the wide range of coefficient of variation (CV) values, the significant differences by the lines and harvest years, and the significant interaction between line and year for lignan contents. Schizandrin contents during 3 years, $1995{\sim}1997$, showed relatively higher amounts more than 0.9% in Chungju 143, Chungju 453, and Chungju 532. Among 23 lines analyzed from 1995 to 1997, Chungju 542, Chungju 547, and Chungju 580 contained continuously higher amounts more than 0.8% of schizandrin and had lower CV values of lignan contents by the harvest years than the other lines. There were a highly significant and negative correlation between fruit weight and lignan contents, and a positive correlation among contents of schizandrin, gomisin A, gomisin N, and total lignan.

Strength Characteristics on Sulfuric Acid Corrosion of Recycled PET Polymer Concrete with Different Fillers (충전재 종류에 따른 PET재활용 폴리머콘크리트의 황산부식에 대한 강도 특성)

  • Jo Byung-Wan;Shin Kyung-Chul;Park Seung-Kook
    • Journal of the Korea Concrete Institute
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    • v.17 no.4 s.88
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    • pp.499-504
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    • 2005
  • Polymer concrete shows excellent mechanical properties and chemical resistance compared with conventional normal cement concrete. The polymer concrete Is drawing a strong interest as high-performance materials in the construction industry Resins using recycled PET offer the possibility of a lower source cost of materials for making useful polymer concrete products. Also the recycling of PET in polymer concrete would help solve some of the solid waste problems Posed by plastics and save energy. An objective of this paper is to estimate the damage of sulfuric acid, through investigating recycled PET polymer concrete, immersed at sulfuric acid solution for 84 days. As a result of testing, recycled PET PC, used $CaCO_3$ as filler, makes a problem of appearance and strength if they are exposed for long term at corrosion environment. On the other hand, recycled PET PC, used fly-ash as filler, had less effect on decrease in weight and strength. Recycled PET PC is excellent chemical resistance, resulting in the role of unsaturated polyester resin which consists of polymer chain structure accomplishes bond of aggregates and filler strongly. Also, recycled PET PC, used fly-ash as filler, is stronger resistance of sulfuric acid corrosion than $CaCO_3$, because it is composed of $SiO_2$ and very strong glassy crystal structure. Therefore, recycled PET PC, used fly-ash as filler, is available under corrosion circumstances like sewer pipe or waste disposal plant.

Effect of Polyolefine Greenhouse Covering Film on Growth of Lettuce and Cucumber in Cool Season Cultivation (상추와 오이재배 하우스의 저온기 PO필름 피복효과)

  • Kwon, Joon-Kook;Park, Kyoung-Sub;Choi, Hyo-Gil;Lee, Sun-Yi;Bekhzod, K.;Kang, Nam-Jun
    • Journal of Bio-Environment Control
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    • v.21 no.4
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    • pp.312-316
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    • 2012
  • This study evaluated the effect of polyolefine greenhouse covering film on growth of lettuce and cucumber. The growth of lettuce and cucumber plants under conventional film (polyethylene plus ethylenevinyl acetate, PE + EVA) and polyolefine (PO) film were evaluated in a greenhouse. The physical qualities of PO film, such as tensile strength and tear strength, were stronger than conventional PE + EVA film. PO film showed 4% higher transmission performance in photosynthetic active radiation (PAR) than PE + EVA film. The average day and night temperature in greenhouse under PO film were $1.5^{\circ}C$ and $0.8^{\circ}C$ higher but there was no significant difference in relative humidity compared with conventional film. Chlorophyll content of lettuce and cucumber plants grown under PO film were higher than conventional film. Growth characteristics; plant height, leaf area, fresh weight and dry weight of cucumber was shown better for PO film. The yields of cucumber and lettuce was increased 14.0% and 13.6% respectively, when the crops were grown under PO covering film greenhouse.

Design of Data-centroid Radial Basis Function Neural Network with Extended Polynomial Type and Its Optimization (데이터 중심 다항식 확장형 RBF 신경회로망의 설계 및 최적화)

  • Oh, Sung-Kwun;Kim, Young-Hoon;Park, Ho-Sung;Kim, Jeong-Tae
    • The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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    • v.60 no.3
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    • pp.639-647
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    • 2011
  • In this paper, we introduce a design methodology of data-centroid Radial Basis Function neural networks with extended polynomial function. The two underlying design mechanisms of such networks involve K-means clustering method and Particle Swarm Optimization(PSO). The proposed algorithm is based on K-means clustering method for efficient processing of data and the optimization of model was carried out using PSO. In this paper, as the connection weight of RBF neural networks, we are able to use four types of polynomials such as simplified, linear, quadratic, and modified quadratic. Using K-means clustering, the center values of Gaussian function as activation function are selected. And the PSO-based RBF neural networks results in a structurally optimized structure and comes with a higher level of flexibility than the one encountered in the conventional RBF neural networks. The PSO-based design procedure being applied at each node of RBF neural networks leads to the selection of preferred parameters with specific local characteristics (such as the number of input variables, a specific set of input variables, and the distribution constant value in activation function) available within the RBF neural networks. To evaluate the performance of the proposed data-centroid RBF neural network with extended polynomial function, the model is experimented with using the nonlinear process data(2-Dimensional synthetic data and Mackey-Glass time series process data) and the Machine Learning dataset(NOx emission process data in gas turbine plant, Automobile Miles per Gallon(MPG) data, and Boston housing data). For the characteristic analysis of the given entire dataset with non-linearity as well as the efficient construction and evaluation of the dynamic network model, the partition of the given entire dataset distinguishes between two cases of Division I(training dataset and testing dataset) and Division II(training dataset, validation dataset, and testing dataset). A comparative analysis shows that the proposed RBF neural networks produces model with higher accuracy as well as more superb predictive capability than other intelligent models presented previously.

Volume of Water Storage and Evapotranspiration by Inserted Materials at a Reservoir of Porous Grass Block (저수형 잔디블록 저수조 내 충진재료에 따른 저수량 및 초종별 증발산량)

  • Han, Seung-Ho;Choi, Joon-Soo;Yang, Geun-Mo;Yang, Byoung-E;Kang, Jin-Hyoung;Kim, Won-Tae
    • Journal of the Korean Institute of Landscape Architecture
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    • v.34 no.5 s.118
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    • pp.76-83
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    • 2006
  • The purpose of this study was to investigate the performance of porous grass block. For the investigation, Festuca arundinacea and Zoysia japonica 'Zenith' were planted, and the volume of evapotranspiration and remains were examined based on different materials in the water tank in the experiment of Festuca arundinacea, the volume of water storage of treatment with perlite ($10.84{\iota}/m^2$) was higher than that with drainage ($7l/m^2$). The difference between the two was $3.84/m^2$. The drainage treatment without water storage capacity showed the higher degree of dryness in turf grass. The volume of evapo-transpiration of treatment with perlite was the highest (21.57mm/week). The volume of evapotranspiration of treatment with sand was 19.57mm/week, and with treatment with drainage was 18.24mm/week. Based on the measured volume of daily evapotranspiration of $2.60{\sim}3.08mm\;d^{-1}$, it was determined that the unit with water storage capacity would store water of one to two days usage compared to unite without such storage capacity. In the experiment of Zoysia japonica 'Zenith', the volume of water storage of treatment with perlite was $10.77l/m^2$ which was similar to the former experiment. The volume of evapotranspiration of treatment with perlite and sand were 21.64mm/week and 20.64mm/week, respectively. In case of airtight water tank, the volume was measured as 22.06mm/week. Each treatment has no notable difference in the volume of evapotranspiration. In conclusion, from the investigation in this study, porous grass block with water tank was found to be effective in plant growth under low irrigation. As the ecological area ratio and vegetated porous pavement have became more emphasized, additional study of rain infiltration and reservoir effect are needed in the future.

The Estimation of Bio-kinetic Parameters using Respirometric Analysis (산소이용률을 이용한 생물학적 동력학 계수 추정)

  • Choung, Youn-Kyoo;Kim, Han-Soo;Yoo, Sung-In
    • Journal of Korean Society of Environmental Engineers
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    • v.22 no.1
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    • pp.11-19
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    • 2000
  • In order to predict the performance of biological wastewater treatment plant, the kinetic parameters and stoichiometric coefficient must be known. The theories and experimental procedures for determining the biological kinetic parameters were discussed in this study. Respirometric analysis in the batch reactor was carried out for the experimental assessment of kinetic parameters. A simple procedure to estimate kinetic parameters of heterotrophs and autotrophs under aerobic condition was presented. The difficulties in the interpretation of COD and VSS measurements encouraged the conversion of respirometric data to growth data. Maximum specific growth rate, yield coefficient, half saturation constant and decay rate of heterotrophic biomass were obtained from OUR(Oxygen Uptake Rate) data. Maximum specific growth rate of autotrophic biomass was obtained from the increase of nitrate concentration. The aim of this paper is to estimate the kinetic parameters of heterotrophic and autotrophic biomass by means of the respirometric analysis of activated sludge behavior in the batch reactors. These procedures may be used for the activated sludge modeling with complex kinetic parameters.

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Artificial Insemination with Low-Dose Semen does not affect Swine Reproductive Performances

  • Chung, Ki-Hwa;Lee, Il-Joo;Sa, Soo-Jin;Kim, In-Cheul;Jung, Byeong-Yeal;Son, Jung-Ho
    • Reproductive and Developmental Biology
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    • v.37 no.4
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    • pp.263-267
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    • 2013
  • Pig producers have been shown keen interest of the number of spermatozoa in a semen dose since pig artificial insemination introduce. However, determining the minimal number of spermatozoa need per AI without detrimental effect on overall reproductive performances is not an easy question to answer. To increase the efficiency of semen utilization in pig AI, optimum number of spermatozoa per dose needed to determine. The objective of this study was to determine the reproductive performance and factors that affect on-farm application of low-dose semen insemination in sows. Data were collected from Darby Genetics AI studs from 4th of June to 7th of July, 2012 (n=401). The numbers of parturition were 84, 234 and 83 in sows inseminated with doses of $1.5{\times}10^9$, $2.0{\times}10^9$ and $2.5{\times}10^9$ spermatozoa in 100ml extender, respectively. There were no significant differences on reproductive performances such as gestation period, total born, total born alive, stillbirth and mummy in sows inseminated with different semen doses. The average number of born alive was 10.5, 11.0 and 10.4 from sows inseminated with $1.5{\times}10^9$, $2.0{\times}10^9$ and $2.5{\times}10^9$ sperms, respectively. Also, number of spermatozoa per dose did not affect litter size (p>0.10). There were no significant differences of maternal genetic line difference on gestation period, total number born, number born alive, born dead and mummy. The estimated correlation coefficients of the different semen doses with total number born, number born alive, born dead and mummy were r=-0.00, -0.01, 0.02 and 0.02, respectively. Taken together, the result of this study suggested that when semen was appropriately inseminated after induced ovulation, insemination with low-dose ($1.5{\sim}2.0{\times}10^9$) semen dose not adversely affect sow's fertility.

U.S. Policy and Current Practices for Blending Low-Level Radioactive Waste for Disposal (저준위 방사성폐기물의 혼합 관련 미국의 정책과 실제 적용)

  • Kessel, David S.;Kim, Chang-Lak
    • Journal of Nuclear Fuel Cycle and Waste Technology(JNFCWT)
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    • v.14 no.3
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    • pp.235-243
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    • 2016
  • In the near future, many countries, including the Republic of Korea, will face a significant increase in low level radioactive waste (LLW) from nuclear power plant decommissioning. The purpose of this paper is to look at blending as a method for enhancing disposal options for low-level radioactive waste from the decommissioning of nuclear reactors. The 2007 U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission strategic assessment of the status of the U.S. LLW program identified the need to move to a risk-informed and performance-based regulatory approach for managing LLW. The strategic assessment identified blending waste of varying radionuclide concentrations as a potential means of enhancing options for LLW disposal. The NRC's position is that concentration averaging or blending can be performed in a way that does not diminish the overall safety of LLW disposal. The revised regulatory requirements for blending LLW are presented in the revised NRC Branch Technical Position for Concentration Averaging and Encapsulation (CA BTP 2015). The changes to the CA BTP that are the most significant for NPP operation, maintenance and decommissioning are reviewed in this paper and a potential application is identified for decommissioning waste in Korea. By far the largest volume of LLW from NPPs will come from decommissioning rather than operation. The large volumes in decommissioning present an opportunity for significant gains in disposal efficiency from blending and concentration averaging. The application of concentration averaging waste from a reactor bio-shield is also presented.