• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.48 no.6
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• pp.1404-1411
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• 2016

Pipe wall thinning in the secondary piping system of a nuclear power plant is currently a major problem that typically affects the safety and reliability of the nuclear power plant directly. Regular in-service inspections are carried out to manage the piping system only during the overhaul. Online thickness monitoring is necessary to avoid abrupt breakage due to wall thinning. To this end, a transducer that can withstand a high-temperature environment and should be installed under the insulation layer. We propose a thin plate type of embedded ultrasonic transducer based on magnetostriction. The transducer was designed and fabricated to measure the thickness of a pipe under a high-temperature condition. A number of experimental results confirmed the validity of the present transducer.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.31 no.3
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• pp.278-286
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• 2011

The on-line monitoring for the wall thinning in secondary system has been considered one of main issues for the safety of nuclear power plants. To establish the on-line monitoring technique for the pipe wall thinning, the development of the ultrasonic transducer working in high-temperature is very important. In this investigation, the magnetostrictive transducer is concerned for high temperature condition up to $300^{\circ}C$. The magnetostrictive transducer has many advantages such as high working temperature, durability, cost-effectiveness, and shear waves, most of all. A thin Fe-Co alloy patch whose Curie temperature is over $900^{\circ}C$ was employed as a ferromagnetic material for magnetostriction. Wave transduction experiments in various temperature were carried out and the effect of bias magnets was considered together with the dry coupling performance of the transducer. From experimental results, consequently, it was found that the magnetostrictive transducer works stable even in high temperature up to $300^{\circ}C$ and can be a promising method for the on-line monitoring of the wall thinning in nuclear power plants.

• Journal of the Korean Wood Science and Technology
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• v.39 no.2
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• pp.117-124
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• 2011

The possibility of using the properties of an ultrasonic wave as a means for monitoring the moisture content of a board during drying was investigated. The ultrasonic wave signals are influenced by moisture content and other factors such as temperature, moisture gradient and coupling area. The effect of temperature was examined by measuring the transit times, amplitudes and velocities of ultrasonic waves transmitted through air, a metal bar and a board at various temperatures. The effect of a moisture gradient was studied using a model specimen composing five wood pieces of various moisture contents. The velocity and amplitude of the ultrasonic waves transmitted through air increase with temperature, while those through a metal bar and a board decrease. It was confirmed that the temperature effect is partially attributed to the change of transducer's properties. The effect of a moisture gradient on the velocity of an ultrasonic wave varies with the average moisture content of a board. As the dimension of the end face of a board increases the velocity of an ultrasonic wave increases and low frequency components more dominates than high frequency components. The transit times of ultrasonic waves transmitted through a board during kiln drying reflect the temperature steps in the drying schedule and the transducer temperatures.

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.18 no.5
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• pp.377-384
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• 2009

The ultrasonic hyperthermia for oncology has been developed and studied. The HIFU(high intensity focused ultrasound) is the most recent method to treat the tumor by using ultrasound. In this study, an insertion-type transducer for treating a prostate cancer, which can focus the ultrasonic beam mechanically and electrically, was designed and developed. The developed transducer was composed of three arrays, and each array has 32 elements. For the purpose of the mechanical focusing, both side arrays are slanted to the center array by $15^{\circ}$. With this structure, NFL(near field length) was set up as 30 mm. The PZT-4 and two matching layers were used, and the backing layer was excepted to prevent energy losses. The acoustic field analysis and the heating test were performed to evaluate the performance of developed transducer. The shape of an acoustic field, peak pressure, and acoustic pressure distribution were compared with numerical simulation. The NFL was 32 mm, the beam width was 5 mm, focal area was $40\;mm^2$, and peak pressure was 5.5 MPa. With heating by using developed transducer, the temperature increased up to $33^{\circ}C$ at focal zone. As a result of this study, the usefulness of suggested transducer for prostate cancer hyperthermia was confirmed by the acoustic field analysis and the heating test with TMM(tissue mimicking) phantom.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.14-20
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• 2003

Piezoelectric ultrasonic transducers for high temperature contact measurement were developed. These high temperature ultrasonic transducers (HTUT) consisted of bismuth titanate piezoceramic element whose Curie temperature is higher than $600^{\circ}C$, a backing material of the mixture of tungsten powder and inorganic binder, an inner alumina tube, a wear Plate and a housing. The operational frequencies or the HTUT were 1.04 and 2.08 MHz, respectively. Various commercially available couplants for high temperature were evaluated and compared. As a couplant for high temperature ultrasonic testing between HTUT and test specimen, gold epoxy was selected. The peak amplitude of pulse-echo signals from steel test specimen decreased with increasing temperature. The operational temperature of the HTUT reached up to $500^{\circ}C$ at which the continuous contact measurement was possible.

• Transactions of the Korean hydrogen and new energy society
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.127-134
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• 2002

A Study on the application of ultrasonic with high frequency is carried out as a plan to rise the efficiency of the hydrogen fuel production in an electrolysis of water. KOH is selected as an electrolyte and concentrations are 0 %, 10 %, 20 %, and 30%. The solvent is city water. A measurable device of buoyancy by an electronic balance and a measurable device of voltage with a sensor of pressure are planned newly as a measuring device to measure the quantity of hydrogen production. An ultrasonic transducer with high frequency of 2 MHz is selected to give them the ultrasonic forcing. In results, it is clarified that ultrasonic influences the decrease of overpotential in the electrolytic solution. And basic data according to the pole interval and the temperature are obtained.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers Conference
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• 1999.05a
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• pp.403-405
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• 1999

Power transformers have a tendency of ultra-high voltage and huge capacity as power demand increases day after day. Therefore, the fault by insulation destruction gives rise to large area of power failure in huge capacity transformers. On-line predictive diagnostics is very important In power transformers because of economic loss and its spreading effect. Hence, this study presents experiments of partial discharge method using ultrasonic sensor in order to confirm the possibility of ultrasonic sensor in power transformers. It carries out the experiments of measuring delay time between ultrasonic sensor and transducer, sensitiities by temperature change of oil and by barriers inside transformers. It is also Included wave analysis by ultrasonic sensor for needle-plate electrode powered on through high-voltage equipments.

• Journal of Welding and Joining
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• v.30 no.6
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• pp.36-41
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• 2012

General condensers consist of many tubes supported by tube sheets and support plates to prevent the deflection of the condenser tubes. When a fluid at high pressure and temperature runs over the tubes for the purpose of transferring heat from one medium to another, the tubes vibrate and their surface comes into contact with the support plates. This vibration causes damage to the tubes, such as cracks and wear. We propose an ultrasonic guided wave technique to detect the above problems in the support plate region. In the proposed method, the ultrasonic guided wave mode, L(0,1), is excited using an internal transducer probe from a single position at the end of the tube. In this paper, we present a preliminary experimental verification using a super stainless tube and show that the defects can be discriminated from the support signals in the support region.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Manufacturing Process Engineers
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.76-81
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• 2012

Ultrasonic metal welding is one of the welding methods which welds metal by applying high frequency vibrational energy into specific area at constant pressure, avaliable in room temperature and low temperature. Ultrasonic metal welder is consisted of power supply, transducer, booster, and horn. Precise designing is required since each parts' shape, length and mass can affect driving frequency and vibration mode. This paper focused to horn design, its length L was set to 62mm by calculating vibration equation. By performing modal analysis with various shape variable b times integer, when length of b is 30mm the output was 39,599Hz at 10th mode. Also by performing harmonic response analysis, the frequency response result was 39,533Hz, which was similar to modal analysis result. In order to observe the designed horn's performance, about 4,000 voltage data was obtained from a light sensor and was analyzed by FFT analysis using Origin Tool. The result RMS amplitude was approximately 8.5${\mu}m$ at 40,000Hz, and maximum amplitude was 12.3${\mu}m$. Therefore, it was verified that the ultrasonic metal welding horn was optimally designed.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers
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• v.24 no.11
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• pp.859-864
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• 2011

An operation temperature of $Pb(Zr,Ti)O_3$ based piezoelectric ultrasonic flowmeter was generally restricted to below 200$^{\circ}C$ due to a low depoling temperature of its ceramic material. Thus, a new designed piezoelectric ultrasonic flowmeter was fabricated in order to protect from the extremely hot fluid. Its structure is optimized by a finite element method to effectively stop heat flowing along a waveguide. Various materials such as Cu, Al, SUS were examined as a multi-plate radiation shield to enhance the performance of piezoelectric ultrasonic flowmeter. The SUS was evaluated as the most effective material to enhance the performance of piezoelectric ultrasonic flowmeter. As the number of plates of the radiation shield increased, the temperature at piezoelectric transducer away from the hot fluid was constantly decreased with a ratio of 3.12$^{\circ}C$ per the plate number.