• Membrane and Water Treatment
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• 제10권1호
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• pp.99-104
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• 2019

In Korea, nonpoint pollutants have a significant effect on rivers' water quality, and they are discharged in very different ways depending on rainfall events. Therefore, preparing an optimal countermeasure against nonpoint pollutants requires much monitoring. The present study was conducted to help prepare a method for installing an automatic nonpoint pollutant measurement system for the cost-effective monitoring of the effect of nonpoint pollutants on rivers. In the present study, monitoring was performed at six sites of a river passing through an urban area with a basin area of $454.3km^2$. The results showed that monitoring could be performed for a relatively long time interval in the upstream and downstream regions, which are mainly comprised of forests, regardless of the rainfall amount. On the contrary, in the urban region, the monitoring had to be performed at a relatively short time interval each time when the rainfall intensity changed. This was because the flow rate was significantly dependent on the rainfall's intensity. The appropriate sites for installing an automatic measurement system were found to be a site before entering the urban region, a site after passing through the urban region, and the end of a river where the effects of nonpoint pollutant sources can be well-decided. The analysis also showed that the monitoring time should be longer for the rainfall events of a higher rainfall class and for the sites closer to the river end. This is because the rainfall runoff has a longer effect on the river. However, the effect of nonpoint pollutant sources was not significantly different between the upstream and the downstream in the cases of rainfall events over 100 mm.

• Advances in Energy Research
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• 제6권1호
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• pp.75-90
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• 2019

Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are rising rapidly despite efforts to curb release of such gases. One long term potential solution to offset these destructive emissions is the capture and storage of carbon dioxide. Partially depleted hydrocarbon reservoirs are attractive targets for permanent carbon dioxide disposal due to proven storage capacity and seal integrity, existing infrastructure. Optimum well completion design in depleted reservoirs requires understanding of prominent geomechanics issues with regard to rock-fluid interaction effects. Geomechanics plays a crucial role in the selection, design and operation of a storage facility and can improve the engineering performance, maintain safety and minimize environmental impact. In this paper, an integrated geomechanics workflow to evaluate reservoir caprock integrity is presented. This method integrates a reservoir simulation that typically computes variation in the reservoir pressure and temperature with geomechanical simulation which calculates variation in stresses. Coupling between these simulation modules is performed iteratively which in each simulation cycle, time dependent reservoir pressure and temperature obtained from three dimensional compositional reservoir models in ECLIPSE were transferred into finite element reservoir geomechanical models in ABAQUS and new porosity and permeability are obtained using volumetric strains for the next analysis step. Finally, efficiency of this approach is demonstrated through a case study of oil production and subsequent carbon storage in an oil reservoir. The methodology and overall workflow presented in this paper are expected to assist engineers with geomechanical assessments for reservoir optimum production and gas injection design for both natural gas and carbon dioxide storage in depleted reservoirs.

• Advances in environmental research
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• 제10권1호
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• pp.17-41
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• 2021

Kazakhstan's cities experience high concentrations levels of atmospheric particulate matter (PM), which is well-known for its highly detrimental effect on the human health. A further increase in PM concentrations in the future could lead to a higher air pollution-caused morbidity and mortality, causing an increase in healthcare expenditures by the government. However, to prevent elevated PM concentrations in the future, more stringent standards could be implemented by lowering current maximum allowable PM concentration limit to Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)'s limits. Therefore, this study aims to find out what impact this change in environmental policy towards PM has on state economy in the long run. Future PM10 and PM2.5 concentrations were estimated using multiple linear regression based on gross regional product (GRP) and population growth parameters. Dose-response model was based on World Health Organization's approach for the identification of mortality, morbidity and healthcare costs due to air pollution. Analysis of concentrations revealed that only 6 out of 21 cities of Kazakhstan did not exceed the EU limit on PM10 concentration. Changing environmental standards resulted in the 71.7% decrease in mortality and 77% decrease in morbidity cases in all cities compared to the case without changes in environmental policy. Moreover, the cost of morbidity and mortality associated with air pollution decreased by $669 million in 2030 and $2183 million in 2050 in case of implementation of OECD standards. Thus, changing environmental regulations will be beneficial in terms of both of mortality reduction and state budget saving.

• Advances in nano research
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• 제13권2호
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• pp.199-206
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• 2022

We present the high-brightness large-area 10.1" in-cell polarizer display panel integrated with a wire grid polarizer (WGP) and metal reflector, from the initial design to final system development in a commercially feasible level. We have modeled and developed the WGP architecture integrated with the metal reflector in a single in-cell layer, to achieve excellent polarization efficiency as well as brightness enhancement through the light recycling effect. After the optimization of key experimental parameters via Taguchi method, the roll nanoimprint lithography employing a flexible large-area tiled mold has been utilized to create the 90 nm-pitch polymer resist pattern with the 54.1 nm linewidth and 5.1 nm residual layer thickness. The 90 nm-pitch Al gratings with the 51.4 nm linewidth and 2150 Å height have been successfully fabricated after subsequent etch process, providing the in-cell WGPs with high optical performance in the entire visible light regime. Finally we have integrated the WGP in a commercial 10.1" display device and demonstrated its actual operation, exhibiting 1.24 times enhancement of brightness compared to a conventional film polarizer-based one, with the contrast ratio of 1,004:1. Polarization efficiency and transmittance of the developed WGPs in an in-cell polarizer panel achieve 99.995 % and 42.3 %, respectively.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• 제80권5호
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• pp.491-501
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• 2021

A difference in subgrade settlement between two rails of a track manifests as lateral differential subgrade settlement. This settlement causes unsteadiness in the motion of trains passing through the corresponding area. To illustrate the effect of lateral differential subgrade settlement on the dynamic response of a vehicle-track coupling system, a three-dimensional vehicle-track-subgrade coupling model was formulated by combining the vehicle-track dynamics theory and the finite element method. The wheel/rail force, car body acceleration, and derailment factor are chosen as evaluation indices of the system dynamic response. The effects of the amplitude and wavelength of lateral differential subgrade settlement as well as the driving speed of the vehicle are analyzed. The study reveals the following: The dynamic responses of the vehicle-track system generally increase linearly with the driving speed when the train passes through a lateral subgrade settlement area. The wheel/rail force acting on a rail with a large settlement exceeds that on a rail with a small settlement. The dynamic responses of the vehicle-track system increase with the amplitude of the lateral differential subgrade settlement. For a 250-km/h train speed, the proposed maximum amplitude for a lateral differential settlement with a wavelength of 20 m is 10 mm. The dynamic responses of the vehicle-track system decrease with an increase in the wavelength of the lateral differential subgrade settlement. To achieve a good operation quality of a train at a 250-km/h driving speed, the wavelength of a lateral differential subgrade settlement with an amplitude of 20 mm should not be less than 15 m. Monitoring lateral differential settlements should be given more emphasis in routine high-speed railway maintenance and repairs.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• 제30권1호
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• pp.75-88
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• 2022

Engineering structures in operation essentially belong to time-varying or nonlinear structures and the resultant response signals are usually non-stationary. For such time-varying structures, it is of great importance to extract time-dependent dynamic parameters from non-stationary response signals, which benefits structural health monitoring, safety assessment and vibration control. However, various traditional signal processing methods are unable to extract the embedded meaningful information. As a newly developed technique, variational mode decomposition (VMD) shows its superiority on signal decomposition, however, it still suffers two main problems. The foremost problem is that the number of modal components is required to be defined in advance. Another problem needs to be addressed is that VMD cannot effectively separate non-stationary signals composed of closely spaced or overlapped modes. As such, a new method named generalized adaptive variational modal decomposition (GAVMD) is proposed. In this new method, the number of component signals is adaptively estimated by an index of mean frequency, while the generalized demodulation algorithm is introduced to yield a generalized VMD that can decompose mode overlapped signals successfully. After that, synchrosqueezing wavelet transform (SWT) is applied to extract instantaneous frequencies (IFs) of the decomposed mono-component signals. To verify the validity and accuracy of the proposed method, three numerical examples and a steel cable with time-varying tension force are investigated. The results demonstrate that the proposed GAVMD method can decompose the multi-component signal with overlapped modes well and its combination with SWT enables a successful IF extraction of each individual component.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• 제29권1호
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• pp.29-39
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• 2022

Crack detection plays an important role in the maintenance and protection of steel box girder of bridges. However, since the cracks only occupy an extremely small region of the high-resolution images captured from actual conditions, the existing methods cannot deal with this kind of image effectively. To solve this problem, this paper proposed a novel three-stage method based on deep learning technology and morphology operations. The training set and test set used in this paper are composed of 360 images (4928 × 3264 pixels) in steel girder box. The first stage of the proposed model converted high-resolution images into sub-images by using patch-based method and located the region of cracks by CBAM ResNet-50 model. The Recall reaches 0.95 on the test set. The second stage of our method uses the Attention U-Net model to get the accurate geometric edges of cracks based on results in the first stage. The IoU of the segmentation model implemented in this stage attains 0.48. In the third stage of the model, we remove the wrong-predicted isolated points in the predicted results through dilate operation and outlier elimination algorithm. The IoU of test set ascends to 0.70 after this stage. Ablation experiments are conducted to optimize the parameters and further promote the accuracy of the proposed method. The result shows that: (1) the best patch size of sub-images is 1024 × 1024. (2) the CBAM ResNet-50 and the Attention U-Net achieved the best results in the first and the second stage, respectively. (3) Pre-training the model of the first two stages can improve the IoU by 2.9%. In general, our method is of great significance for crack detection.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• 제81권5호
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• pp.565-574
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• 2022

The infrastructures such as offshore, bridges, power plant, oil and gas piping and aircraft operate in a harsh environment during their service life. Structural integrity of engineering components used in these industries is paramount for the reliability and economics of operation. Two regression models based on the concept of Gaussian process regression (GPR) and Minimax probability machine regression (MPMR) were developed to predict stress intensity factor range (𝚫K). Both GPR and MPMR are in the frame work of probability distribution. Models were developed by using the fatigue crack growth data in MATLAB by appropriately modifying the tools. Fatigue crack growth experiments were carried out on Eccentrically-loaded Single Edge notch Tension (ESE(T)) specimens made of API 5L X65 Grade steel in inert and corrosive environments (2.0% and 3.5% NaCl). The experiments were carried out under constant amplitude cyclic loading with a stress ratio of 0.1 and 5.0 Hz frequency (inert environment), 0.5 Hz frequency (corrosive environment). Crack growth rate (da/dN) and stress intensity factor range (𝚫K) values were evaluated at incremental values of loading cycle and crack length. About 70 to 75% of the data has been used for training and the remaining for validation of the models. It is observed that the predicted SIF range is in good agreement with the corresponding experimental observations. Further, the performance of the models was assessed with several statistical parameters, namely, Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Coefficient of Efficiency (E), Root Mean Square Error to Observation's Standard Deviation Ratio (RSR), Normalized Mean Bias Error (NMBE), Performance Index (ρ) and Variance Account Factor (VAF).

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• 제41권5호
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• pp.681-695
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• 2021

Many existing transmission or communication towers designed several decades ago have undergone nonreversible performance degradation, making it hardly meet the additional requirements from upgrades in wind load design codes and extra services of electricity and communication. Therefore, a new-type non-destructive reinforcement method was proposed to reduce the on-site operation of drilling and welding for improving the quality and efficiency of reinforcement. Six built-up steel angle members were tested under compression to examine the reinforcement performance. Subsequently, the cyclic loading test was conducted on a pair of steel angle tower sub-structures to investigate the reinforcement effect, and a simplified prediction method was finally established for calculating the buckling bearing capacity of those new-type retrofitted built-up steel angles. The results indicates that: no apparent difference exists in the initial stiffness for the built-up specimens compared to the unreinforced steel angles; retrofitting the steel angles by single-bolt clamps can guarantee a relatively reasonable reinforcement effect and is suggested for the reduced additional weight and higher construction efficiency; for the substructure test, the latticed substructure retrofitted by the proposed reinforcement method significantly improves the lateral stiffness, the non-deformability and energy dissipation capacity; moreover, an apparent pinching behavior exists in the hysteretic loops, and there is no obvious yield plateau in the skeleton curves; finally, the accuracy validation result indicates that the proposed theoretical model achieves a reasonable agreement with the test results. Accordingly, this study can provide valuable references for the design and application of the non-destructive upgrading project of steel angle towers.

• Advances in aircraft and spacecraft science
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• 제10권2호
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• pp.107-125
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• 2023

Drag reduction is significant research in aircraft design due to its effect on the cost of operation and carbon footprint reduction. Aircraft currently use conventional solid winglets to reduce the induced drag, adding extra structural weight. Fluidic on-demand winglets can effectively reduce drag for low-speed flight regimes without adding any extra weight. These utilize the spanwise airflow from the wingtips using hydraulic actuators to create jets that negate tip vortices. This study develops a computational model to investigate fluidic on-demand winglets. The well-validated computational model is applied to investigate the effect of injection velocity and angle on the aerodynamic coefficients of a rectangular wing. Further, the turbulence parameters such as turbulent kinetic energy (TKE) and turbulent dissipation rate are studied in detail at various velocity injections and at an angle of 30°. The results show that the increase in injection velocity shifted the vortex core away from the wing tip and the increase in injection angle shifted the vortex core in the vertical direction. Further, it was found that a 30° injection is efficient among all injection velocities and highly efficient at a velocity ratio of 3. This technology can be adopted in any aircraft, effectively working at various angles of attack. The culmination of this study is that the implementation of fluidic winglets leads to a significant reduction in drag at low speeds for low aspect ratio wings.