• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.47 no.4
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• pp.488-499
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• 2015

Acceleration sensors are usually used to measure the vibration of a structure. Although this is the most accurate method, it cannot be used remotely because these are contact-type sensors. This makes measurement difficult in areas that cannot be easily approached by surveyors, such as structures located in high or dangerous areas. Therefore, a method that can measure the structural vibration without installing sensors is required for the vibration measurement of structures located in these areas. Many conventional studies have been carried out on non-contact-type vibration measurement methods using cameras. However, they have been applied to structures with relatively large vibration displacements such as buildings or bridges, and since most of them use targets, people still have to approach the structure to install the targets. Therefore, a new method is required to supplement the weaknesses of the conventional methods. In this paper, a method is proposed to measure vibration displacements remotely using a camera without having to approach the structure. Furthermore, an estimation method for the measurement resolution and measurement error is proposed for the vibration displacement of a cylindrical structure measured using the proposed measurement method. The proposed methods are described, along with experimental results that verify their accuracy.

• Korean Journal of Organic Agriculture
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.45-71
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• 2001

The duck-rice forming system is increasingly spread up throughout Korea since 1992. It is discussed the rice field, rice quality, weed and pest management in the duck-rice weeding system compared to conventional farming system. Moreover the optimizing duck population, system management and fertilizer application rate were reported. Energy input and output by duck-rice farming system were carefully compared with those of low input sustainable paddy field and conventional farming paddy field. To find out the environmentally sound function of duck-rice system, the total nitrogen in paddy soil and paddy water, and nitrogen cycle in paddy rice cultivation system were analysed. finally the input and output were calculated, and ecological characteristic were determined in terms of nitrogen balance, labor input, animal input, renewable energy input, turnover of soil organic matter, energy loss, non-renewable indirect and direct energy input. It was concluded duck-rice weeding system could be recommended in terms of net only environmentally sound, but also farmer's income. But there are still some research needs for successful adaption of duck-rice farming to investigate to determine the optimal population of duck in rice paddy field unit, release time of duckling, duck management after release, and strategy for duck marketing and duck processing.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.43 no.4
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• pp.343-354
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• 2011

It is critically important to identify unexpected loose parts in a nuclear reactor pressure vessel, since they may collide with and cause damage to internal structures. Mass estimation can provide key information regarding the kind as well as the location of loose parts. This study proposes a mass estimation method based on an artificial neural network (ANN), which can overcome several unresolved issues involved in other conventional methods. In the ANN model, input parameters are the discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients of the auto-power spectrum density (APSD) of the measured impact acceleration signal. The performance of the proposed method is then evaluated through application to a large-sized plate and a 1/8-scaled mockup of a reactor pressure vessel. The results are compared with those obtained using a conventional method, the frequency ratio (FR) method. It is shown that the proposed method is capable of estimating the impact mass with 30% lower relative error than the FR method, thus improving the estimation performance.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.50 no.1
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• pp.88-96
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• 2018

Concerns over reliability assessments of the main components in nuclear power plants (NPPs) related to aging and continuous operation have increased. The conventional reliability assessment for main components uses experimental correlations under general conditions. Most NPPs have been operating in Korea for a long time, and it is predictable that NPPs operating for the same number of years would show varying extent of aging and degradation. The conventional reliability assessment does not adequately reflect the characteristics of an individual plant. Therefore, the reliability of individual components and an individual plant was estimated according to operating data and conditions. It is essential to reflect aging as a characteristic of individual NPPs, and this is performed through prognostics. To handle this difficulty, in this paper, the general path model/Bayes, a data-based prognostic method, was used to update the reliability estimated from the generic database. As a case study, the authors consider the aging for steam generator tubes in NPPs and demonstrate the suggested methodology with data obtained from the probabilistic algorithm for the steam generator tube assessment program.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.52 no.11
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• pp.2522-2534
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• 2020

It is well known that the model of nuclear reactors features natural nonlinearity, and variable parameters during power tracking operation. In this paper, a disturbance observer-based adaptive sliding mode control (DOB-ASMC) strategy is proposed for power tracking of the pressurized-water reactor (PWR) in the presence of lumped disturbances. The nuclear reactor model is firstly established based on point-reactor kinetics equations with six delayed neutron groups. Then, a new sliding mode disturbance observer is designed to estimate the lumped disturbance, and its stability is discussed. On the basis of the developed DOB, an adaptive sliding mode control scheme is proposed, which is a combination of backstepping technique and integral sliding mode control approach. In addition, an adaptive law is introduced to enhance the robustness of a PWR with disturbances. The asymptotic stability of the overall control system is verified by Lyapunov stability theory. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate that the proposed DOB-ASMC strategy has better power tracking performance than conventional sliding mode controller and PID control method as well as conventional backstepping controller.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.52 no.10
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• pp.2328-2333
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• 2020

The filter technique was applied to noise images, as noise is the significant factor that cause poor image quality due to lower photon counting. The purpose of this study is to confirm that image quality can be improved using the median modified Wiener filter (MMWF) technique; this is achieved via a National Electrical Manufacturers Association International Electrotechnical Commission body phantom with four large spheres that are filled with the ^99mTc radioisotope when evaluating the image quality. Conventional filters such as Wiener, Gaussian, and median filters were designed, and signal to noise ratio, coefficient of variation, and contrast to noise ratio were used as the evaluation parameters. The improvement in the image quality was in the following order, from the least to the highest improvement, in all cases: Wiener filter, Gaussian filter, median filter, and the MMWF technique. The results show that the image quality was improved from 20.6 to 65.5%, 7.4-40.3%, and 12.7-44.7% for the SNR, COV, and CNR values, respectively, when using the MMWF technique, compared with the use of conventional filters. In conclusion, our results demonstrated that the MMWF technique is useful for reducing the noise distribution in gamma camera images.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.48 no.2
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• pp.339-350
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• 2016

Based on the resonance integral (RI) tables produced by the NJOY program, the conventional subgroup method usually ignores both the resonance elastic scattering and the resonance interference effects. In this paper, on one hand, to correct the resonance elastic scattering effect, RI tables are regenerated by using the Monte Carlo code, OpenMC, which employs the Doppler broadening rejection correction method for the resonance elastic scattering. On the other hand, a fast resonance interference factor method is proposed to efficiently handle the resonance interference effect. Encouraging conclusions have been indicated by the numerical results. (1) For a hot full power pressurized water reactor fuel pin-cell, an error of about +200 percent mille could be introduced by neglecting the resonance elastic scattering effect. By contrast, the approach employed in this paper can eliminate the error. (2) The fast resonance interference factor method possesses higher precision and higher efficiency than the conventional Bondarenko iteration method. Correspondingly, if the fast resonance interference factor method proposed in this paper is employed, the $k_{inf}$ can be improved by ~100 percent mille with a speedup of about 4.56.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.48 no.2
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• pp.351-359
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• 2016

The Korean Prototype Gen-IV sodium-cooled fast reactor (PGSFR) is supposed to be loaded with a relatively-costly low-enriched U fuel, while its envisaged transuranic fuels are not available for transmutation. In this work, the U-enrichment reduction by improving the neutron economy is pursued to save the fuel cost. To improve the neutron economy of the core, a new reflector material, PbO, has been introduced to replace the conventional HT9 reflector in the current PGSFR core. Two types of PbO reflectors are considered: one is the conventional pin-type and the other one is an inverted configuration. The inverted PbO reflector design is intended to maximize the PbO volume fraction in the reflector assembly. In addition, the core radial configuration is also modified to maximize the performance of the PbO reflector. For the baseline PGSFR core with several reflector options, the U enrichment requirement has been analyzed and the fuel depletion analysis is performed to derive the equilibrium cycle parameters. The linear reactivity model is used to determine the equilibrium cycle performances of the core. Impacts of the new PbO reflectors are characterized in terms of the cycle length, neutron leakage, radial power distribution, and operational fuel cost.

• Korean Journal of Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration Engineering
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• v.17 no.6
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• pp.596-604
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• 2005

This paper presents the work on evaluating the LCC (Life-Cycle Cost) of a heat pump system as unutilized energy system. The river water as an unutilized energy source was used for the heat source of heat pump system. LCC analysis is a concrete method for evaluating the economical efficiency of energy facilities of building. The present case study shows an example of adequate use of the LCC analysis on a heat pump system and conventional gas boiler and refrigerator for building heat supply. A life cycle of 20 years was used to calculated net present value of energy cost. Over a 20 year life cycle, the energy cost could be reduced by 612 million won if a heat pump system were used instead of a conventional boiler and an absorption refrigerator.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.53 no.7
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• pp.2341-2347
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• 2021

Because single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) is one of the widely used nuclear medicine imaging systems, it is extremely important to acquire high-quality images for diagnosis. In this study, we designed a super-resolution (SR) technique using dense block-based deep convolutional neural network (CNN) and evaluated the algorithm on real SPECT phantom images. To acquire the phantom images, a real SPECT system using a^99mTc source and two physical phantoms was used. To confirm the image quality, the noise properties and visual quality metric evaluation parameters were calculated. The results demonstrate that our proposed method delivers a more valid SR improvement by using dense block-based deep CNNs as compared to conventional reconstruction techniques. In particular, when the proposed method was used, the quantitative performance was improved from 1.2 to 5.0 times compared to the result of using the conventional iterative reconstruction. Here, we confirmed the effects on the image quality of the resulting SR image, and our proposed technique was shown to be effective for nuclear medicine imaging.