• Toxicological Research
• /
• v.34 no.3
• /
• pp.221-229
• /
• 2018

Tenofovir nanoparticles are novel therapeutic intervention in human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection reaching the virus in their sanctuary sites. However, there has been no systemic toxicity testing of this formulation despite global concerns on the safety of nano drugs. Therefore, this study was designed to investigate the toxicity of Tenofovir nanoparticle (NTDF) on the liver and kidney using an animal model. Fifteen adult male Sprague-Dawley (SD) rats maintained at the animal house of the biomedical resources unit of the University of KwaZulu-Natal were weighed and divided into three groups. Control animals (A) were administered with normal saline (NS). The therapeutic doses of Tenofovir (TDF) and nanoparticles of Tenofovir (NTDF) were administered to group B and C and observed for signs of stress for four weeks after which animals were weighed and sacrificed. Liver and kidney were removed and fixed in formal saline, processed and stained using H/E, PAS and MT stains for light microscopy. Serum was obtained for renal function test (RFT) and liver function test (LFT). Cellular measurements and capturing were done using ImageJ and Leica software 2.0. Data were analysed using graph pad 6, p values < 0.05 were significant. We observed no signs of behavioural toxicity and no mortality during this study, however, in the kidneys, we reported mild morphological perturbations widening of Bowman's space, and vacuolations in glomerulus and tubules of TDF and NTDF animals. Also, there was a significant elevation of glycogen deposition in NTDF and TDF animals when compared with control. In the liver, there were mild histological changes with widening of sinusoidal spaces, vacuolations in hepatocytes and elevation of glycogen deposition in TDF and NTDF administered animals. In addition to this, there were no significant differences in stereological measurements and cell count, LFT, RFT, weight changes and organo-somatic index between treatment groups and control. In conclusion, NTDF and TDF in therapeutic doses can lead to mild hepatic and renal histological damage. Further studies are needed to understand the precise genetic mechanism.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
• /
• v.9 no.2
• /
• pp.360-369
• /
• 2008

The solar cells should be operated at the maximum power point because its output characteristics were greatly fluctuated on the variation of insolation, temperature and load. It is necessary to install an inverter among electric power converts by means of the output power of solar cell is DC. The inverter is operated supply a sinusoidal current and voltage to the load and the interactive utility line. In this paper, the proposes a photovoltaic system is designed with a step up chopper and single phase PWM voltage source inverter. Synchronous signal and control signal was processed by one-chip microprocessor for stable modulation. The step up chopper is operated in continuous mode by adjusting the duty ratio so that the photovoltaic system tracks the maximum power point of solar cell without any influence on the variation of insolation and temperature for solar cell has typical dropping character. The single phase PWM voltage source inverter is consists of complex type of electric power converter to compensate for the defect, that is, solar cell cannot be develop continuously by connecting with the source of electric power for ordinary using. It can be cause the efect of saving electric power, from 10 to 20%. The single phase PWM voltage source inverter operates in situation, that its output voltage is in same phase with the utility voltage. The inverter are supplies an ac power with high factor and low level of harmonics to the load and the utility power system.

• Korean Journal of Veterinary Research
• /
• v.33 no.2
• /
• pp.269-275
• /
• 1993

Tissue distribution of RHDV in rabbits were examined by immunofluorescence and ABC methods. Tissues including liver, spleen, kidneys, lungs and brain were frozen, cut in a crycut, and fixed in 10% buffered formalin, embedded in paraplast, and cut $5{\sim}7{\mu}m$ thickness. Sections were immunostained Tissue distribution of RHDV in rabbits were examined by immunofluorescence and ABC methods. Tissues including liver, spleen, kidneys, lungs and brain were frozen, cut in a crycut, and fixed in 10% buffered formalin, embedded in paraplast, and cut $5{\sim}7{\mu}m$ thickness. Sections were immunostained with primary antiserum and conjugated second antibodies as recommended by manufacturer. None of the cultures tested showed virus-induced phenomena. Immunoreactive products were commonly found in the liver, in some cases there were also positive staining in the spleen and kidneys. Other organs showed weak or insignificant immunoreactions. By ABC method on the formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded liver tissues, strong immunoreactivity was found in the periportal triad lesions and peripheral lesions of the hepatic lobules. Immunoreactive products showed diffuse fine granular in the cytoplasm of hepatocytes and sinusoidal cells. In some cells, immunoproducts marginate at the periphery of the cells. The intensive staining of the cytoplasm of infected cells allowed their exact differentiation from surrounding uninfected cells. The positive area involved coincided with histopathological lesion on serial liver sections. In conclusion, liver was proved to be a consistent target organ in RHD, and the immunoperoxidase method in the section of formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded hepatic tissue could be broadly used for the routine diagnosis of the disease.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
• /
• v.25 no.1
• /
• pp.15-19
• /
• 2005

Conventional eddy current testing has been used for the detection of the defect-like fatigue crack in the conductive materials, such as aluminum, which uses a sinusoidal signal with very narrow frequency bandwidth, Whereas, the pulsed eddy current method uses a pulse signal with a broad bandwidth. This can allow multi-frequency eddy current testing, and the penetration depth is greater than that of the conventional eddy current testing. In this work, a pulsed eddy current instrument was developed for evaluating the metal loss. The developed instrument was composed of the pulse generator generating the maximum square pulse voltage of 40V, an amplifier controlled up to 52dB, an A/D converter of 16 bit and the sampling frequency of 20 MHz, and an industrial personal computer operated by the Windows program. A pulsed eddy current probe was designed as a pancake type in which the sensing roil was located inside the driving roil. The output signals of the sensing roil increased rapidly wich the step pulse driving voltage かn off, and the latter part of the sensing coil output voltage decreased exponentially with time. The decrement value of the output signals increased as the thickness of the aluminum test piece increased.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Surveying, Geodesy, Photogrammetry and Cartography
• /
• v.27 no.5
• /
• pp.599-605
• /
• 2009

Changes of atmospheric pressures cause short- and long-term crustal deformations and thus become error sources in the site positions estimated from space geodesy equipments. In this study, we computed daily displacements due to the atmospheric pressure loading (ATML) at the 14 permanent GPS sites operated by National Geographic Information Institute. And the 10-year GPS data collected at those stations were processed to create a continuous time series of the height estimate. Then, we corrected for the ATML from the GPS height time series to see if the correction changes the site velocity and improves the precision of the time series. While the precision improved by about 4% on average, the velocity change was not significant at all. We also investigated the overall characteristics of the ATML in the southern Korean peninsula by computing the ATML effects at the inland grid points with a $0.5^{\circ}{\times}0.5^{\circ}$ spatial resolution. We found that ATML displacements show annual signals and those signals can be fitted with sinusoidal functions. The amplitudes were in the range of 3-4 mm, and they were higher at higher latitudes and lower at the costal area.

• The Journal of Engineering Research
• /
• v.2 no.1
• /
• pp.113-123
• /
• 1997

The purpose of this paper is an optimum design of the shaped Cassegrainian antenna system for the base station. The process of the shaped Cassegrainian antenna design is as follows : 1) the aperture field distribution is determined so as to meet design specifications, 2) a proper design parameter is selected, 3) extracting of the dimension data for the main and sub-reflector antenna To do these, Hansen's distribution is chosen as the aperture field, and the far-field pattern from the aperture is predicted by the angular spectrum. Firstly, the aperture field distribution is designed to satisfy the specification for design frequency, it is confirmed if this distribution meet the specification for another frequency band. The main- and the sub-reflectors are synthesized so as for the given beamwaveguide feed pattern to be transformed into the prescribed aperture distribution. The designed system has circular aperture, left-right symmetry and no tilted structure. The continuous surface functions of reflectors are obtained by adopting the global interpolation technique to the discrete reflector profiles. Jacobi polynomial-sinusoidal is used as the basis function. A Ka-band Cassegrainian antenna operates over 17.7 – 20.2 GHz for down-link band and 27.5 – 30 GHz for up-link band is designed.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
• /
• v.17 no.2
• /
• pp.119-129
• /
• 2004

A three dimensional (3D) method of analysis is presented for determining the free vibration frequencies and mode shapes of thick, circular and annular plates with nonlinear thickness variation along the radial direction. Unlike conventional plate theories, which are mathematically two dimensional (2D), the present method is based upon the 3D dynamic equations of elasticity. Displacement components u/sub s/, u/sub z/, and u/sub θ/ in the radial, thickness, and circumferential directions, respectively, are taken to be sinusoidal in time, periodic in θ, and algebraic polynomials in the s and z directions. Potential (strain) and kinetic energies of the plates are formulated, and the Ritz method is used to solve the eigenvalue problem thus yielding upper bound values of the frequencies by minimizing the frequencies. As the degree of the polynomials is increased, frequencies converge to the exact values. Convergence to four digit exactitude is demonstrated for the first five frequencies of the plates. Numerical results we presented for completely free, annular and circular plates with uniform linear, and quadratic variations in thickness. Comparisons are also made between results obtained from the present 3D and previously published thin plate (2D) data.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
• /
• v.18 no.4
• /
• pp.429-438
• /
• 1997

Mechanical valve is one of the most widely used implantable artificial organs of which the reliability is so important that its failure means the death of patient. Therefore early noninvasive detection is essentially required, though mechanical valve failure with thrombosis is the most common. The objective of this paper is to detect the thrombosis formation by spectral analysis and neural network. Using microphone and amplifier, we measured the sound from the mechanical valve which is attached to the pneumatic ventricular assist device. The sound was sampled by A/D converter(DaqBook 100) and the periodogram is the main algorithm for obtaining spectrum. We made the thrombosis models using pellethane and silicon and they are thrombosis model on the valvular disk, around the sewing ring and fibrous tissue growth across the orifice of valve. The performance of the measurment system was tested firstly using 1 KHz sinusoidal wave. The measurement system detected well 1KHz spectrum as expected. The spectrum of normal and 5 kinds of thrombotic valve were obtained and primary and secondary peak appeared in each spectrum waveform. We find that the secondary peak changes according to the thrombosis model. So to distinguish the secondary peak of normal and thrombotic valve quantatively, 3 layer back propagation neural network, which contains 7, 000 input node, 20 hidden layer and 1 output was employed The trained neural network can distinguish normal and valve with more than 90% probability. As a conclusion, the noninvasive monitoring of implanted mechanical valve is possible by analysing the acoustical spectrum using neural network algorithm and this method will be applied to the performance evaluation of other implantable artificial organs.

• Journal of Astronomy and Space Sciences
• /
• v.14 no.1
• /
• pp.44-58
• /
• 1997

The BVR CCD photometric observations of W UMa-type eclipsing binary SS Ari were made on ten nights from November 1996 to December 1996. Eight new times of minimum lights were derived. The analysis of times of minima of SS Ari confirms the suggestions of other previous investigators that the orbital period of SS Ari have been suffering from a sinusoidal varition. The amplitude and period for the cyclic period changes were calculated as about $58^{y}$ and $0.^{d}053$, respectively. The period variation has been discussed in terms of two potential mechanisms: 1) the light-time effect due to a hypothetical third body and 2) deformations in the convective envelope of a magnetically active component. In the earlier case, the third body has a mass of $1.3M_{\odot}$, if exist, in the form of a white dwarf or a binary system. It seems that the system velocities from the spectroscopic observations supports this interpretation. Meanwhile in the latter case, the primary component is mainly responsible for the magnetic activity of this system with a theoretical amplitude of $\pm0.^{m}08$. However, we cannot make a conclusion which is reasonable explanation at this point, due to lack of observational data. Moreover, the period variation of SS Ari shows duplication about $14^y$, cyclic period with an amplitude of about $0.^d001$ to the above periodic change. We also cannot make an acceptable conclusion for it at this time.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics T
• /
• v.35T no.1
• /
• pp.90-98
• /
• 1998

This paper is to describe the improved vector control which can control the induction motor robustly in low speed. When the induction motor is drived with low speed, below 10 percent of the rated speed, an algorithm which can compensate the error of unit vector angle generated by the harmonics is proposed. Another algorithm which can be tuned to the rotor time constant so that nay be robust to the rotor parameter change in low speed and transient state was proposed. The ripple of flux and torque was reduced by the proposed vector control and then the stable output characteristics was obtained in low speed. When the input and output is sinusoidal, the proposed vector control, the direct vector control and the indirect vector control were analyzed and compared in the low speed characteristics. And each control characteristics is compared and analyzed in state of containing harmonics. The estimation and tunning performance of rotor time constant is confirmed with simulation. The whole control system is implemented by real hardware and experimented to compare the proposed vector control with the direct vector control. As a result of the experiment with two control methods in low speed, the torque ripple of the proposed vector control is improved by 45 percent than the direct vector control. And it is confirmed that the flux current ripple is reduced in 0.2 p.u. and torque current ripple is reduced in 0.6 p.u. It is confirmed that the rotor time constant by the estimation and the tunning algorithm is tunned by the real rotor time constant. Finally, it was confirmed that the validity and robustness for the proposed vector control in low speed existed.