• 한국미생물·생명공학회지
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• 제47권4호
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• pp.651-661
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• 2019

Targeting the pathogen viability using drugs is associated with development of drug resistance due to selective pressure. Hence, there is an increased interest in developing agents that target bacterial virulence. In this study, the inhibitory effect of ciclopirox, an antifungal agent with iron chelation potential, on the microbial virulence factors was evaluated in 26 clinical MDR Pseudomonas aeruginosa isolates collected from Alexandria Main University Hospital, a tertiary hospital in Egypt. Treatment with 9 ㎍/ml ciclopirox inhibited the hemolytic activity in 70% isolates, reduced pyocyanin production, decreased protease secretion in 46% isolates, lowered twitching and swarming motility, and decreased biofilm formation by 1.5- to 4.5-fold. The quantitative real-time PCR analysis revealed that treatment with ciclopirox downregulated the expression levels of alkaline protease (aprA) and pyocyanin (phzA1). Ciclopirox is used to treat hematological malignancies and the systemic administration of ciclopirox is reported to have adequate oral absorption with a satisfactory drug safety profile. It is important to calculate the appropriate clinical dose and therapeutic index to reposition ciclopirox from a topical antifungal agent to a promising virulence-modifying agent agent against P. aeruginosa, a problematic Gram-negative pathogen.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• 제76권2호
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• pp.193-205
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• 2020

The growing need for assuring efficient and sustainable investments in civil engineering structures has determined a renovated interest in the rational design of such structures from designers, clients and authorities. As a result, risk-informed decision-making methodologies are increasingly being used as a direct decision tool or as an upper-level layer from which performance-based approaches are then calibrated against. One of the most important and challenging aspects of today's structural design is to adequately handle the system-level effects, the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns. These aspects revolve around assessing and evaluating relevant damage scenarios, namely those involving unacceptable/intolerable damage levels. Hence, the importance of risk analysis of disproportionate collapse, and along with it of robustness. However, the way robustness has been used in modern design codes varies substantially, from simple provisions of prescriptive rules to complex risk analysis of the disproportionate collapse. As a result, implementing design for robustness is still very much a grey area and more so when it comes to defining means to quantify robustness. This paper revisits the most common robustness frameworks, highlighting their merits and limitations, and identifies one among them which is very promising as a way forward to solve the still open challenges.

• 한국IT서비스학회지
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• 제19권3호
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• pp.17-34
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• 2020

Recently, various attempts have been made to discover promising items and technologies. However, there are very few data-driven approaches to support business diversification by companies with specific technologies. Therefore, there is a need for a methodology that can detect items related to a specific technology and recommend highly marketable items among them as business diversification targets. In this paper, we devise Labeled Item Network for Business Diversification Consulting Support System. Our research is performed with three sub-studies. In Sub-study 1, we find the proper source documents to build the item network and construct item dictionary. In Sub-study 2, we derive the Labeled Item Network and devise four index for item evaluation. Finally, we introduce the application scenario of our methodology and describe the result of real-case analysis in Sub-study 3. The Labeled Item Network, one of the main outcome of this study, can identify the relationships between items as well as the meaning of the relationship. We expect that more specific business item diversification opportunities can be found with the Labeled Item Network. The proposed methodology can help many SMEs diversify their business on the basis of their technology.

• 한국전기전자재료학회논문지
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• 제18권7호
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• pp.662-666
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• 2005

Silicon nitride $(SiN_x)$ film is a promising material for anti-reflection coating and passivation of multicrystalline silicon (me-Si) solar cells. In this work, a plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) system with batch-type reactor tube was used to prepare highly robust $SiN_x$ films for screen-printed mc-Si solar cells. The Gas flow ratio, $R=[SiH_4]/[NH_3]$, in a mixture of silane and ammonia was varied in the range of 0.0910.235 while maintaining the total flow rate of the process gases to 4,200 sccm. The refractive index of the $SiN_x$ film deposited with a gas flow ratio of 0.091 was measured to be 2.03 and increased to 2.37 as the gas flow ratio increased to 0.235. The highest efficiency of the cell was $14.99\%$ when the flow rate of $SiH_4$ was 350 sccm (R=0.091). Generally, we observed that the efficiency of the mc-Si solar cell decreased with increasing R. From the analysis of the reflectance and the quantum efficiency of the cell, the decrease in the efficiency was shown to originate mainly from an increase in the surface reflectance for a high flow rate of $SiH_4$ during the deposition of $SiN_x$ films.

• 대한기계학회논문집B
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• 제30권4호
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• pp.287-297
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• 2006

The Holographic Particle Velocimetry system can be a promising optical tool for the measurements of three dimensional particle velocities. One of inherent limitations of particle holography is the very long depth of field of particle images, which causes considerable difficulty in the determination of particle positions in the optical axis. In this study, we introduced three auto-focusing parameters corresponding to the size of particles, namely, Correlation Coefficient, Sharpness Index, and Depth Intensity to determine the focal plane of a particle along the optical axis. To investigate the suitability of the above parameters, the plane image of dot array screens containing different size of dots was recorded by diffused illumination holography and the positions of each dot in the optical axis were evaluated. In addition, the effect of particle position from the holographic film was examined by changing the distance of the screen from the holographic film. All measurement results verified that the evaluated positions using suggested auto-focusing parameters remain within acceptable range of errors. These research results may provide fundamental information for the development of the holographic velocimetry system based on the automatic image processing.

• 대한기계학회논문집A
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• 제29권8호
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• pp.1102-1108
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• 2005

The integrity of nuclear piping systems has to be maintained sufficiently all the times during operation. In order to maintain the integrity, reliable assessment procedures including fracture mechanics analysis, etc, are required. Up to now, the integrity assessment has been performed using conventional deterministic approach even though there are lots of uncertainties to hinder a rational evaluation. In this respect, probabilistic approach is considered as an appropriate method for piping system evaluation. The objectives of this paper are to develop a probabilistic assessment program using reliability index and simulation technique and to estimate the damage probability of wall-thinned pipes in secondary systems. The probabilistic assessment program consists of three evaluation modules which are first order reliability method, second order reliability method and Monte Carlo simulation method. The developed program has been applied to evaluate damage probabilities of wall-thinned pipes subjected to internal pressure, global bending moment and combined loading. The sensitivity analysis results as well as prototypal evaluation results showed a promising applicability of the probabilistic integrity assessment program.

• 대한기계학회논문집A
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• 제27권11호
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• pp.1889-1896
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• 2003

In the microfluidic applications, viscous-driven pumping mechanism is a promising one since the viscous effect increases significantly as the size of device decreases, relative to the inertial effect. However, there exist a few drawbacks we have to improve such as low efficiency and small volume flow rate. In the present study, an optimum design synthesis is proposed to enhance the performance characteristics of the micropump with single rotating cylinder. First, the unstructured grid CFD method is described and validated by comparing its results to the previous results. Next, an automated optimum design synthesis tool is constructed by combining the aforementioned CFD analysis model with the mathematical optimization model. This technique is used to improve the performance characteristics of newly designed viscous-driven pump. The presented results show that the fluid dynamic optimization tool is robust and may be applied to other microfluidic device design applications.

• 응용통계연구
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• 제22권3호
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• pp.499-513
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• 2009

An economic signal in the real world usually reflects complex phenomena. One may have difficulty both extracting and interpreting information embedded in such a signal. A natural way to reduce complexity is to decompose the original signal into several simple components, and then analyze each component. Spectral analysis (Priestley, 1981) provides a tool to analyze such signals under the assumption that the time series is stationary. However when the signal is subject to non-stationary and nonlinear characteristics such as amplitude and frequency modulation along time scale, spectral analysis is not suitable. Huang et al. (1998b, 1999) proposed a data-adaptive decomposition method called empirical mode decomposition and then applied Hilbert spectral analysis to decomposed signals called intrinsic mode function. Huang et al. (1998b, 1999) named this two step procedure the Hilbert-Huang transform(HHT). Because of its robustness in the presence of nonlinearity and non-stationarity, HHT has been used in various fields. In this paper, we discuss the applications of the HHT and demonstrate its promising potential for non-stationary financial time series data provided through a Korean stock price index.

• 한국정밀공학회지
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• 제22권10호
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• pp.158-166
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• 2005

Pressurized gas pipeline is subject to harmful effects both of the surrounding environment and of the materials transmitted in them. In order to maintain the integrity, reliable assessment procedures including tincture mechanics analysis etc are required. Up to now, the integrity assessment has been performed using conventional deterministic approaches even though there are many uncertainties to hinder a rational evaluation. In this respect, probabilistic approach is considered as an appropriate method for gas pipeline evaluation. The objectives of this paper are to estimate the failure probability of corroded pipeline in gas and oil plants and to propose limited operating conditions under different types of leadings. To do this, a probabilistic assessment program using reliability index and simulation techniques was developed and applied to evaluate failure probabilities of corroded API-5L-X52/X60 gas pipelines subjected to internal pressure, bending moment and combined loading. The evaluation results showed a promising applicability of the probabilistic integrity assessment program.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• 제10권5호
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• pp.2081-2101
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• 2016

Successive interference cancellation (SIC) is considered to be a promising technique to mitigate multi-user interference and achieve concurrent uplink transmissions, but the optimal power allocation (PA) issue for SIC users is not well addressed. In this article, we focus on the optimization of the PA ratio of users on an SIC channel and analytically obtain the optimal PA ratio with regard to the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) threshold for successful demodulation and the sustainable demodulation error rate. Then, we design an efficient resource allocation (RA) scheme using the obtained optimal PA ratio. Finally, we compare the proposal with the near-optimum RA obtained by a simulated annealing search and the RA scheme with random PA. Simulation results show that our proposal achieves a performance close to the near-optimum and much higher performance than the random scheme in terms of total utility and Jain's fairness index. To demonstrate the applicability of our proposal, we also simulate the proposal in various network paradigms, including wireless local area network, body area network, and vehicular ad hoc network.