• Smart Structures and Systems
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• 제6권3호
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• pp.211-223
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• 2010

Accurate sensing of mechanical strains in civil structures is critical for optimizing structure reliability and lifetime. For instance, combined with intelligent control systems, electromechanical sensor output feedback has the potential to be employed for nondestructive damage evaluation. Application of Ionic Polymer Transducers (IPTs) represents a relatively new sensing approach with more than an order of magnitude higher sensitivity than traditional piezoelectric sensors. The primary reason this sensor has not been widely used to date is an inadequate understanding of the physics responsible for IPT sensing. This paper presents models and experiments defending the hypothesis of a streaming potential sensing mechanism.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• 제22권4호
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• pp.369-382
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• 2018

Novel design of interdigitated electrodes capable of increasing the performance of piezoelectric transducers are proposed. The new electrodes' geometry improve the electromechanical coupling by offering an enhanced adaptation of the electric field to the interdigitated electrode configuration. The proposed analysis is based on finite element modeling and takes into account local polarization effect. It is shown that the proposed electrodes considerably increase the strain generation compared to flat electrode arrangement used for Macro Fiber Composite (MFC) and Active Fiber Composite (AFC) actuators. Also, electric field singularities are reduced allowing better reliability of the transducer against electric failure.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• 제30권4호
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• pp.371-383
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• 2022

A novel impact localization method is presented based on impact induced elastic waves in sensorized composite structure subjected to temperature fluctuations. In real practices, environmental and operational conditions influence the acquired signals and consequently make the feature (particularly Time of Arrival (TOA)) extraction process, complicated and troublesome. To overcome this complication, a robust TOA estimation method is proposed based on the times in which the absolute amplitude of the signal reaches to a specific amplitude value. The presented method requires prior knowledge about the normalized wave velocity in different directions of propagation. To this aim, a finite element model of the plate was built in ABAQUS/CAE. The impact location is then highlighted by calculating an error value at different points of the structure. The efficiency of the developed impact localization technique is experimentally evaluated by dropping steel balls with different energies on a carbon fiber composite plate with different temperatures. It is demonstrated that the developed technique is able to localize impacts with different energies even in the presence of noise and temperature fluctuations.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• 제22권4호
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• pp.481-493
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• 2018

Ultrasonic guided waves have attracted increasing attention for non-destructive testing (NDT) and structural health monitoring (SHM) of bridge cables. They offer advantages like single measurement, wide coverage of acoustical field, and long-range propagation capability. To design defect detection systems, it is essential to understand how guided waves propagate in cables and how to select the optimal excitation frequency and mode. However, certain cable characteristics such as multiple wires, anchorage, and polyethylene (PE) sheath increase the complexity in analyzing the guided wave propagation. In this study, guided wave modes for multi-wire bridge cables are identified by using a semi-analytical finite element (SAFE) technique to obtain relevant dispersion curves. Numerical results indicated that the number of guided wave modes increases, the length of the flat region with a low frequency of L(0,1) mode becomes shorter, and the cutoff frequency for high order longitudinal wave modes becomes lower, as the number of steel wires in a cable increases. These findings were used in design of transducers for defect detection and selection of the optimal wave mode and frequency for subsequent experiments. A magnetostrictive transducer system was used to excite and detect the guided waves. The applicability of the proposed approach for detecting and locating wire breakages was demonstrated for a cable with 37 wires. The present ultrasonic guided wave method has been found to be very responsive to the number of brokenwires and is thus capable of detecting defects with varying sizes.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• 제4권6호
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• pp.727-740
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• 2008

A down hole vertical seismic array is a sequence of instruments installed at various depths in the earth to record the ground motion at multiple points during an earthquake. Numerous studies demonstrate the unique utility of vertical seismic arrays for studying in situ site response and soil behavior. Examples are given of analyses made at two sites to show the value of data from vertical seismic arrays. The sites examined are the Lotung, Taiwan SMART1 array and a new site installed at Jingliao, Taiwan. Details of the installation of the Jingliao array are given. ARX models are theoretically the correct process models for vertical wave propagation in the layered earth, and are used to linearly map deeper sensor input signals to shallower sensor output signals. An example of Event 16 at the Lotung array is given. This same data, when examined in detail with a Bayesian inference model, can also be explained by nonlinear filters yielding commonly accepted soil degradation curves. Results from applying an ARMAX model to data from the Jingliao vertical seismic array are presented. Estimates of inter-transducer soil increment resonant frequency, shear modulus, and damping ratio are presented. The shear modulus varied from 50 to 150 MPa, and damping ratio between 8% and 15%. A new hardware monitoring system - TerraScope - is an affordable 4-D down-hole seismic monitoring system based on independent, microprocessor-controlled sensor Pods. The Pods are nominally 50 mm in diameter, and about 120 mm long. An internal 16-bit micro-controller oversees all aspects of instrumentation, eight programmable gain amplifiers, and local signal storage.

• 한국윤활학회:학술대회논문집
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• 한국윤활학회 2002년도 proceedings of the second asia international conference on tribology
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• pp.289-290
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• 2002

Stainless steel ball bearings are used in the control element drive mechanism and driving mechanisms such as step motor and gear boxes for the integral nuclear reactor, SMART. The bearings operate in pressurized pure water (primary coolant) at high temperature and should be lubricated with only this water because it is impossible to supply greases or any additional lubricant since the whole nuclear rector system should be perfectly sealed and the coolant cannot contain ingredients for bearing lubrication. Temperature of water changes from room temperature to about 120 degree Celsius and pressure rises up to 15MPa in the nuclear reactor. It can be anticipated that the frictional characteristics of the ball bearings changes according to the operating conditions, however little data are available in the literature. It is found that friction coefficient of 440C stainless steel itself does not change sharply according to temperature variation from the former research, and the friction coefficient is about 0.45 at low speed range. In this research frictional characteristics of the assembled ball bearings are investigated. A special tribometer is used to simulate the axial loading and the bearing operating conditions, temperature and pressure in the driving mechanism in the nuclear reactor. Highly purified water is used as lubricant ‘ and the water is heated up to 120 degree Celsius and pressurized to 15MPa. Friction force is monitored by the torque transducer.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• 제8권3호
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• pp.321-341
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• 2011

Acoustic emission (AE) monitoring was conducted for mortar specimens under three types of static loading patterns (cubic-splitting, direct-shear and pull-out). Each of the applied loading patterns was expected to produce a particular fracture process. Subsequently, the AEs generated by various fracture or damage processes carried specific information on temporal micro-crack behaviors of concrete for post analysis, which was represented in the form of detected AE signal characteristics. Among various available characteristics of acquired AE signals, frequency content was of great interest. In this study, cement-based piezoelectric sensor (as AE transducer) and home-programmed DEcLIN monitoring system were utilized for AE monitoring on mortar. The cement-based piezoelectric sensor demonstrated enhanced sensitivity and broad frequency domain response range after being embedded into mortar specimens. This broad band characteristic of cement-based piezoelectric sensor in frequency domain response benefited the analysis of frequency content of AE. Various evaluation methods were introduced and employed to clarify the variation characteristics of AE frequency content in each test. It was found that the variation behaviors of AE frequency content exhibited a close relationship with the applied loading processes during the tests.

• 한국멀티미디어학회논문지
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• 제19권2호
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• pp.105-111
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• 2016

In order to inspect the quality of spot welding, inefficient destructive test and NDT (non destructive testing) utilizing expensive foreign ultrasonic inspection are being conducted in the automobile production lines, but NDT will be difficult to be used in the domestic automobile production due to complexity of the waveform analysis and lack of mobility. In this paper, NDT system inspecting the quality of spot welding based on mobile network is proposed to complement drawbacks of the conventional inefficient destructive testing and NDT inspecting the quality of spot welding. Regardless of daily condition of NDT tester, the proposed NDT system can determine the quality of spot welding automatically and transmit the information of NDT quality to smart devices of field workers in real-time so that convenience of NDT and productivity of automobile production will be improved. Several specimens with a variety of welding quality was produced to evaluate the performance of the proposed mobile ultrasonic NDT system and the conventional foreign equipment, through this experiments, the proposed mobile ultrasonic NDT system indicate the superior properties compared to the conventional equipment in terms of convenience, productivity, and economic.

• 센서학회지
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• 제27권5호
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• pp.352-356
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• 2018

This paper relates to a technology for monitoring a liquefied gas storage tank in the special gas field where demand is increasing owing to the continuous growth of related fields such as the semiconductor, display, and ICT convergence electronics industries. We have proposed a system for real - time monitoring using wireless sensor network technology, and implemented a system consisting of a sensor unit, transmitter module, and receiver module to be attached to a liquefied gas storage tank. The system was applied to LCO2 tanks among various liquefied gas storage tanks to verify the feasibility. The storage tanks employed in the experiments has capacities of 16,179 l and was 1,920 mm in inner diameter. Furthermore, the density was 1.03 g/l. The measured data were compared with reference data on the remaining gas level versus the $CO_2$ height of the surface, expressed using a conventional water meter, provided by an existing storage tank supplier. The experimental results show that the data is similar to the standard data provided by the tank supplier, and has a high accuracy and reliability within an error range of 0.03%.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• 제6권2호
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• pp.167-182
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• 2010

An adaptronic strut for machine tools with parallel kinematics for compensation of the influence of geometric errors is introduced. Implemented within the strut is a piezoelectric sensor-actuator unit separated in function. In the first part of this contribution, the functional principle of the strut is presented. For use of one piezoelectric transducer as both, sensor and actuator as so-called self-sensing actuator, the acquisition of the sensing signal while actuating simultaneously using electrical bridge circuits as well as filter properties are examined. In the second part the control concept developed for the adaptronic strut is presented. A co-simulation model of the strut for simulating the controlled multi-body behavior of the strut is set-up. The control design for the strut as a stand-alone system is tested under various external loads. Finally, the strut is implemented into a model of the complete machine tool and the influence of the controlled strut onto the behavior of the machine tool is examined.