• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2009.10a
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• pp.427-428
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• 2009

In the manufacture process of refrigerator cabinet, polyurethane(PU) liquid firstly is injected between outer plate and inner case in high temperature about $40^{\circ}C$, and PU foam is generated and solidified to the room temperature. There will be great residual stress in the PU foam, especially at the corners after the whole refrigerator is completely assembled. The stress condition will become more complicated under operating condition because of the large temperature difference between the freezing room and outer plate. And also, there are great differences of properties for plastic and steel which would cause different deformation under temperature gradient. The steel outer plate would expand compared to the PU foam or ABS material under operation condition, which induces a thermally bowing deformation in the refrigerator cabinet. The objective of this paper is to design an optimum bead structure or to use reinforcement in the refrigerator except for improving material properties in order to decrease the deformation.

• Progress in Superconductivity and Cryogenics
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.25-28
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• 2011

A compact phase controller of pulse tube refrigerator is proposed in this paper. Most pulse tube refrigerators available now consist of a long inertance tube and reservoir as the phase controller. The long inertance tube and reservoir present a challenge for compact packaging in some applications. To overcome this disadvantage, the long inertance tube and reservoir are replaced with the compact phase controller consisted of mass, spring and damper in pulse tube refrigerator. This process is achieved using similarity of mechanical, electrical, and acoustic system and the specific configuration of the compact phase controller is designed. From the simulation code in this paper, the performance of pulse tube refrigerator with the designed compact phase controller is confirmed to be comparable to pulse tube refrigerator with the long inertance tube and reservoir.

• The KSFM Journal of Fluid Machinery
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.45-51
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• 2011

The kimchi refrigerator is the electronic home appliance which is used for the maturing and a custody of the kimchi. In this paper, performance improvement of fan and duct system for kimchi refrigerator has been studied by using a commercial CFD code. In order to achieve a improved fan performance, three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics and the Design of Experiments method have been applied. Additionally, to know the optimized duct inlet shape with the optimized fan, the overall performances were calculated with various duct inlet shapes. The final fan and duct system for kimchi refrigerator showed improved performance in efficiency and total head compared with the existing model.

• Archives of design research
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.245-252
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• 2001

On the assumption that the layout of refrigerator for domestic market does not match with the eating habits of the Korean, this study suggests a way of improvement for usability of the refrigerator by re-arranging layout of inner shelves through behavioral analysis with the video ethnography. On the result of analysis, it can be found that the layout of inner shelves of the most refrigerators differs from the habits of cooking and preparing meals of Korean food, so the author propose a new layout to exchange the usage of the 3rd shelf with the vegetable box of the bottom level. It can be effective method to improve the usability by assigning appropriate usage for each shelf. To extract internal design factors of product, which is related to the specific living habits such as a refrigerator, understanding of user behavior must be accomplished at the first stage. The author found that the analysis of user behavior using the video ethnography is useful for this purpose, because it can be used to explore unpredictable design factors from user's real life.

• Journal of Korean Institute of Industrial Engineers
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• v.37 no.1
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• pp.10-18
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• 2011

Ergonomic product design considering users' natural use motion is of importance to improve the usability and satisfaction of a product. A five-step process of product design was developed in the present study by measuring and analyzing users' natural product-use motion with a motion capture system. The developed process was applied to ergonomic design improvement of a half guard installation part of refrigerator; new guard designs (diagonal and arc shape) were developed with the process and evaluated in terms of validity during the development as two measures (task satisfaction and similarity of natural motion). According to the evaluation result, the satisfaction at putting in- and out-task of new guard designs ($6.3{\pm}0.5$ points) was significantly higher than that of existing guard designs ($3.3{\pm}1.0$ points); the difference between natural motion and product-use motion in new guard designs ($1.0{\pm}0.3cm$) was significantly less than that of existing guard designs ($2.0{\pm}0.2cm$). The proposed process of natural motion analysis and product design is applicable to ergonomic product design and evaluation.

• 연구논문집
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• s.24
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• pp.27-39
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• 1994

lower vibration than in any other small refrigerators. The experimental results of three types of pulse tube refrigerators are presented in this paper. The objectives of this study are to develop the design technology of the double inlet pulse tube refrigerator and acquire its application method. As a preliminary experiment, the refrigeration performances of the basic, orifice and double inlet pulse tube refrigerator were investigated. The lowest temperature obtained in this experiment was 34.4K. The refrigeration capacity at the optimum operating condition of the double inlet pulse tube refrigerator was 23W at 80K.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Manufacturing Process Engineers
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• v.20 no.7
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• pp.66-71
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• 2021

In this study, the shape design optimization of a refrigerator door hinge stopper was performed to reduce the discrepancy in the opening forces of the left and right doors of a double-door refrigerator. A finite element model was constructed and analyzed by quasi-static analyses to evaluate the structural performance of the door hinge stopper. The reaction moment calculated at the hinge axis was used as a measure of the door opening and closing forces. The design objective is to increase the door opening force by 50% while maintaining the door closing force and the maximum stress calculated in the body of the hinge stopper at the current level. A new design concept with a contacting slot was proposed to decouple the door closing and opening forces. Shape optimization was performed to determine the dimensions of the new design of the hinge stopper, and the rib pattern was determined by topological optimization to further increase the door opening force. It was observed that the new design met all design requirements.

• Proceedings of the Korea Society of Design Studies Conference
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• 2001.10a
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• pp.61.2-61
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• 2001

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.32 no.8
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• pp.727-734
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• 2015

Currently, polyurethane (PU) foam is used in most refrigerators as a thermal insulator, whereby the material contributes to structural stiffness by joining the refrigerator cases; however, refrigerator PU foam induces a low thermal efficiency and results in environmental contamination. To resolve these issues, we applied the vacuum insulated panel (VIP) instead of PU form in the design of a new refrigerator type, whereby the VIP significantly contributes to the rectification of the previously mentioned issues. The VIP structure, however, cannot effectively hold refrigerator cases, so the present study investigated a new frame-structure concept by evaluating the stiffness using the topology optimization of refrigerator cases. Lastly, a refrigerator prototype comprising an optimal frame structure was built and subject to a stiffness test, and a comparison of the test results with those of a conventional refrigerator show that the structural stiffness of the prototype is sufficiently effective.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.59-66
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• 2014

The central seam, the vertical 'line' between doors, in the front view of a refrigerator must have its gap and flush within certain ranges to meet functional and aesthetic requirements. The conventional criteria for gap and flush control in the industry are to keep the gap and flush within certain ranges at each of various points along the seam. For aesthetics, however, the uniformity of the gap is also as important because a 'tapered' seam is negatively perceived by human eyes. This paper shows a case study of tolerance design for a refrigerator door system. It presents a step-by-step procedure, which consists of datum flow chain analysis, identification of assembly features, computer modeling of feature tolerances, assembly operations and measurements, tolerance simulation, and tolerance adjustments based on the simulation results. It is found that extra care may need to be used to satisfy the aesthetical criterion for gap uniformity.