• Journal of the Korean Institute of Gas
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.50-57
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• 2016

According to the urban gas business legislation, cathodic protection systems should be applied for buried steel gas pipelines to prevent corrosion. In advanced countries including United States, the criteria for Cathodic Protection Potential is at least -850mV with respect to a saturated copper/copper sulfate electrode(CSE) when the CP applied, and the IR drops must be considered for valid interpretation. However, the IR drop through the pipe to soil boundary has been neglected in Korea. According to KGS code, a reference electrode must be placed in proximity to gas pipelines possible when measuring the CP potential. In this study, we have installed several solid reference electrodes around the buried pipeline(1.2m depth), lower surface(0.5m depth), and the surface individually in order to measure the CP potentials through the each reference electrode and find out the IR drops according to the location of each reference electrode. We have found the IR drop is the greatest when measuring the CP potential through the electrode placed on the ground and the IR drop is the smallest through the electrode installed near pipeline. Therefore, we have suggested the solid reference electrode should be installed as close as possible to buried pipeline in order to measure the correct CP potential without IR drop. We have also suggested the amendment of CP criteria considering IR drop.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.37 no.1
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• pp.175-185
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• 2017

As the gas is manufactured, handled and used more often due to the continuous increase of gas, the related facility gets expanded and more complex causing small and big accident which causes economic loss including damage for humans and materials. The gas pipeline, the most common gas facility, has the biggest risk of accidents. Especially in the urban area and densely populated areas, the accident due to the high pressure pipeline may cause even more serious damages. To prevent the accident caused by the buried pipeline, it is required for the relevant authorities to evaluate the damage and risk of the whole pipeline system effectively. A risk is usually defined as a possibility or probability of an undesired event happening, and there is always a risk even when the probability of failure is set low once the pipeline is installed or under operation. It is reported that the accident caused by the failure of the pipeline rarely happens, however, it is important to minimize the rate of accidents by analyzing the reason of failure as it could cause a huge damage of humans and property. Therefore, the paper rated the risk of pipelines with quantitative numbers using the qualitative risk analysis method of the Scoring Model. It is assumed that the result could be effectively used for practical maintenance and management of pipelines securing the safety of the pipes.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 2004.11c
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• pp.532-534
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• 2004

The advancement of electronics and telecommunication technologies has forced the risk management system for underground metallic structures to evolve into the remote monitoring and control system. Especially, facilities such as gas pipelines, oil pipelines and water distribution lines might make hazardous effect on human safety without continuous monitoring and control. As a result, pipeline engineers have applied cathodic protection system to prevent the degradation of their facilities by corrosion and carried out a periodic monitoring of the pipe-to-soil (P/S) potentials at numberous test boxes along their pipelines. The latter action on a road in downtowns, however, is so much dangerous that the inspectors should be ready to suffer the threatening of their lives and maintenance. In order to minimize these social costs and hazards, a stand-alone type corrosion monitoring equipment which can be installed in test box, store the P/S data for given Belied and send the data by wired/wireless telecommunications is under development. In order to obtain the exact P/S data, however, a reference electrode should be located as close to the pipeline as possible. Actually, the measured potential by a conventional portable reference electrode contain inevitably an IR drop portion caused by the current flow from the cathodic protection rectifier or the subway railroad. To minimize this error, it is recommended that the reference electrode should be buried within 10 cm from the pipeline. In this paper, we describe the design parameters for fabricating the permanent type reference electrode and the characteristics of the developed reference electrode.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.25 no.10
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• pp.1551-1558
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• 2001

Recently, a number of underground pipelines have been drastically increased. The integrity of these buried pipelines, especially gas transmitting pipelines, is of importance due to an explosive characteristic of natural gas. The third party damage is known as one of the most critical factor which causes fatal accidents. For this reason, a number of systems detecting third party damage are under development. The major concern in the development of third party damage detection system is to transmit vibration signals out of accelerometer to signal conditioner and data acquisition system without any interference caused by noise. The objective of this paper is to develope a fiber optic accelerometer applicable to third party damage detection system. A fiber optic accelerometer was developed by use of combining principles of one degree of freedom vibration model and an extrinsic Fabry-Perot interferometer. The developed fiber optic accelerometer was designed to perform with a sensitivity of 0.06mVg, a frequency range of less than 6kHz and an amplitude range of -200g to 200g. The developed, accelerometer was compared with a piezoelectric accelerometer and calibrated. In order to verify the developed accelerometer, the field experiment was performed. From the field experiment, vibration signals and the location of impact were successfully detected. The developed accelerometer is expected to be used for the third party damage detection system which requires long distance transmission of signals.

• Journal of Korean Society of Water and Wastewater
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• v.30 no.1
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• pp.59-67
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• 2016

Owing to time and cost constraints, new methods that would make it possible to evaluate the safety of the water supply pipeline in a less time- and cost-consuming manner are urgently needed. In response to this exigency, the present study developed a new statistical model to assess the safety of the water supply pipeline using the quantification theory type II. In this research, the safety of the water supply pipeline was defined as 'a possibility of the pipeline failure'. Quantification analysis was conducted on the qualitative data, such as pipe material, coating, and buried condition. The results of analyses demonstrate that the hit ratio of the quantification function amounted to 77.8% of hit ratio, which was a fair value. In addition, all variables that were included in the quantification function were logically valid and demonstrated statistically significant. According to the results derived from the application of the safety evaluation model, the coefficient of determination ($R^2$) between K-region's water supply pipeline safety and the safety inspection amounted to 0.80. Therefore, these findings provide meaningful insight for the measured values in real applications of the model. The results of the present study can also be meaningfully used in further research on safety evaluation of pipelines, establishing of renewal prioritization, as well as asset management planning of the water supply infrastructure.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Gas
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• v.18 no.5
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• pp.66-71
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• 2014

Gas pipelines are the core facilities in the gas facilities and the most pipelines are buried underground and are exposed to the risk of corrosion caused by the soil characteristics and the environmental impact. The anti-corrosion potential and the corrosion status of the underground pipelines are measured periodically in accordance with the relevant laws and regulations. A study on the cathodic protection measurement system was carried out in order to solve the problems of the conventional measurement system. This paper describes the survey on the standards and the specifications of the cathodic protection measurement and the the reference electrode to meet the relevant regulations, and the development of the measuring circuit and the data transmission module to build the cathodic protection measurement system. This study verified the field applicability through the testing of the developed prototype and investigated on the problems of the previous studies and the future research and development direction.

• Journal of Magnetics
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.36-41
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• 2011

If gas is leaking out of gas pipelines, it could cause a huge explosion. Accordingly, it is important to ensure the integrity of gas pipelines. Traditionally, over the years, gas-operating companies have used the ILI system, which is based on axial magnetic flux leakage (MFL), to inspect the gas pipelines. Relatively, there is a low probability of detection (POD) for the axial defects with the axial MFL-based ILI. To prevent the buried pipeline from corrosion, it requires a protective coating. In addition to the potential damage to the coating by environmental factors and external forces, there could be defects on the damaged coating area. Thus, it is essential that nondestructive evaluation methods for detecting axial defects (axial cracks, axial groove) and damaged coating be developed. In this study, an electromagnetic acoustic transducer (EMAT) sensor was designed and fabricated for detecting axial defects and coating disbondment. In order to validate the performances of the developed EMAT sensor, experiments were performed with specimens from axial cracks, axial grooves, and coating disbondment. The experimental results showed that the developed EMAT sensor could detect not only the axial cracks (minimum 5% depth of wall thickness) and axial grooves (minimum 10% depth of wall thickness), but also the coating disbondment.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.14 no.5
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• pp.65-76
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• 2010

In this paper, earthquake fragility analysis has been comparatively performed with regard to a buried gas pipeline of API X65 which has been widely used in Korea. For this purpose, a nonlinear time-history analyses has been carried out for 15 different analytical models of a buried gas pipeline in terms of the selected 12 sets of earthquake ground motions with 0.1g of scaling interval. Following that, earthquake fragility analyses have been conducted using the maximum axial strain of the pipeline obtained from the nonlinear time-history analyses. Parameters under consideration for subsequent earthquake fragility analyses are soil conditions, end-restraint conditions, burial depth and the type of pipeline. Comparative analyses reveal that whereas the first three parameters influence the fragility curves, particularly soil conditions amongst the three parameters, the last parameter has a little effect on the curves. In all, the present study can be considered as a benchmark fragility analysis of a buried gas pipeline in the absence of an earthquake fragility analysis of the pipeline and thus is expected to be a useful source regarding earthquake fragility analyses of a buried gas pipelines.

• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.55 no.spc1
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• pp.1177-1185
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• 2022

The water and sewage system is an infrastructure that provides safe and clean water to people. In particular, since the water and sewage pipelines are buried underground, it is very difficult to detect system defects. For this reason, the diagnosis of pipelines is limited to post-defect detection, such as system diagnosis based on the images taken after taking pictures and videos with cameras and drones inside the pipelines. Therefore, real-time detection technology of pipelines is required. Recently, pipeline diagnosis technology using advanced equipment and artificial intelligence techniques is being developed, but AI-based defect detection technology requires a variety of learning data because the types and numbers of defect data affect the detection performance. Therefore, in this study, various defect scenarios are implemented using 3D printing model to improve the detection performance when detecting defects in pipelines. Afterwards, the collected images are performed to pre-processing such as classification according to the degree of risk and labeling of objects, and real-time defect detection is performed. The proposed technique can provide real-time feedback in the pipeline defect detection process, and it would be minimizing the possibility of missing diagnoses and improve the existing water and sewerage pipe diagnosis processing capability.

• Journal of Energy Engineering
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.204-211
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• 2008

Polyethylene(PE) pipes have been widely used as they are easy to construct and suitable for economical efficient when they are compared with metal pipelines. This paper studied the effect of various external loadings on stress and deflection of the buried PE pipes using Finite Element Method(FEM). For this purpose, stresses of buried PE pipes were calculated according to the loading condition such as pipe types(pipe diameter $50{\sim}400mm$), burial depths($0.6{\sim}1.2m$) and internal pressures($0.4{\sim}4bar$). As a result, it was founded the effect and relation with each of loading conditions under the buried condition.