• Transactions of the Korean Society of Pressure Vessels and Piping
• /
• v.14 no.2
• /
• pp.49-58
• /
• 2018

The regulatory periodic inspection program (PSI) conducted at every overhaul period is the most important process for confirming the safety of nuclear power plants. The PSI for operating nuclear power plants in Korea mainly consist of component level performance check that had been developed based on deterministic approach putting the same degree of importance to all the inspection items. This inspection methodology is likely to be effective for preoperational inspection. However, once the plant is put into service, the PSI must be focused on whether to minimize the risk of accident using defense-in-depth concept and risk insight. The incorporation of defense-in-depth concept and risk insight into the deterministic based safety inspection has not been well studied so far. In this study, two track approaches are proposed to make sure that core damage be avoided: one is to secure success path and the other to block the failure path in a specific event tree of PSA. The investigation shows how to select safety important components and how to set up inspection group to ensure that core damage would not occur for a given initiating event, which results in strengthening defense-in-depth level 3.

• Tribology and Lubricants
• /
• v.38 no.5
• /
• pp.222-226
• /
• 2022

Between diaphragms made of stainless steel (SUS), which is the main component of a hydrogen gas compressor, micro-slip occurs owing to repeated bending, resulting in scratches on the surface. The surface scratch of the compressor part is a problem with airtightness, which reduces the efficiency of the compressor; in severe cases, damage is a possibility. In this study, the changes in friction and wear characteristics due to the surface polishing of SUS and carbon-based solid lubricant films (graphene and CNT) were analyzed. Bare SUS, polished SUS, graphene film, and CNT film specimens were prepared. The surface roughness of the SUS was significantly reduced by surface polishing but increased by carbon-based solid lubricating films. In contrast, the friction coefficient maintained a similar value after surface polishing but was significantly reduced by the carbon-based solid lubricant films. In particular, the graphene film exhibited the lowest initial friction coefficient, while the CNT film exhibited the lowest overall average friction coefficient. Regarding the wear rate, polished SUS exhibited the lowest value, but the surface condition of the wear track showed that the carbon-based solid lubricating films were relatively less damaged. Although the wear rate measured was largely attributed to the solid lubricating film peeling off, the SUS surface under the film was considered protected.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Crop Science Conference
• /
• 2022.10a
• /
• pp.5-5
• /
• 2022

A little more than a decade ago, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) started on a journey of revitalization through adopting the concept of systems research. Instead of being just a rice breeding and affiliated sciences research center, it expanded its vision of impact on the rice-based food systems. In almost the same vein the OneCGIAR has also attempted to aggregate the commodity-based research into food systems-based research that critically caters to specific overarching 'Impact and Action Areas'. Incidentally, IRRI's structure and operations map on to these Impact and Action areas very well. Hence, IRRI's research directly caters to societal, economic and environmental sustainability. It does so through a coherent pipeline that spans the upstream discovery component all the way to product delivery, dissemination, and impact assessment. While a circular 5D-pipeline of demand, discovery, development, deployment and distinction attend to the ground-level realities of demand, development and acceptance of a product, the Four Flagships attend to proximal deliverables under challenging conditions of change brought about by the CGIAR restructuring and COVID-19. Prioritizing specific products under the flagships ensures that institutional support is available to fast-track the deliverables. Clear examples now highlight the potential of such approaches. Thus, despite the challenges of climate change, political unrest of war and global medical encumbrances, the stable partners of IRRI like Korea have helped to come close to deliverables.

• Proceedings of the Materials Research Society of Korea Conference
• /
• 2011.05a
• /
• pp.5-5
• /
• 2011

The research and development of hybrid electric vehicle (HEV), plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) and electric vehicle (EV) are intensified due to the energy crisis and environmental concerns. In order to meet the challenging requirements of powering HEV, PHEV and EV, the current lithium battery technology needs to be significantly improved in terms of the cost, safety, power and energy density, as well as the calendar and cycle life. One new technology being developed is the utilization of composite cathode by mixing two different types of insertion compounds [e.g., spinel $LiMn_2O_4$ and layered $LiMO_2$ (M=Ni, Co, and Mn)]. Recently, some studies on mixing two different types of cathode materials to make a composite cathode have been reported, which were aimed at reducing cost and improving self-discharge. Numata et al. reported that when stored in a sealed can together with electrolyte at $80^{\circ}C$ for 10 days, the concentrations of both HF and $Mn^{2+}$ were lower in the can containing $LiMn_2O_4$ blended with $LiNi_{0.8}Co_{0.2}O_2$ than that containing $LiMn_2O_4$ only. That reports clearly showed that this blending technique can prevent the decline in capacity caused by cycling or storage at elevated temperatures. However, not much work has been reported on the charge-discharge characteristics and related structural phase transitions for these composite cathodes. In this presentation, we will report our in situ x-ray diffraction studies on this mixed composite cathode material during charge-discharge cycling. The mixed cathodes were incorporated into in situ XRD cells with a Li foil anode, a Celgard separator, and a 1M $LiPF_6$ electrolyte in a 1 : 1 EC : DMC solvent (LP 30 from EM Industries, Inc.). For in situ XRD cell, Mylar windows were used as has been described in detail elsewhere. All of these in situ XRD spectra were collected on beam line X18A at National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) at Brookhaven National Laboratory using two different detectors. One is a conventional scintillation detector with data collection at 0.02 degree in two theta angle for each step. The other is a wide angle position sensitive detector (PSD). The wavelengths used were 1.1950 ${\AA}$ for the scintillation detector and 0.9999 A for the PSD. The newly installed PSD at beam line X18A of NSLS can collect XRD patterns as short as a few minutes covering $90^{\circ}$ of two theta angles simultaneously with good signal to noise ratio. It significantly reduced the data collection time for each scan, giving us a great advantage in studying the phase transition in real time. The two theta angles of all the XRD spectra presented in this paper have been recalculated and converted to corresponding angles for ${\lambda}=1.54\;{\AA}$, which is the wavelength of conventional x-ray tube source with Cu-$k{\alpha}$ radiation, for easy comparison with data in other literatures. The structural changes of the composite cathode made by mixing spinel $LiMn_2O_4$ and layered $Li-Ni_{1/3}Co_{1/3}Mn_{1/3}O_2$ in 1 : 1 wt% in both Li-half and Li-ion cells during charge/discharge are studied by in situ XRD. During the first charge up to ~5.2 V vs. $Li/Li^+$, the in situ XRD spectra for the composite cathode in the Li-half cell track the structural changes of each component. At the early stage of charge, the lithium extraction takes place in the $LiNi_{1/3}Co_{1/3}Mn_{1/3}O_2$ component only. When the cell voltage reaches at ~4.0 V vs. $Li/Li^+$, lithium extraction from the spinel $LiMn_2O_4$ component starts and becomes the major contributor for the cell capacity due to the higher rate capability of $LiMn_2O_4$. When the voltage passed 4.3 V, the major structural changes are from the $LiNi_{1/3}Co_{1/3}Mn_{1/3}O_2$ component, while the $LiMn_2O_4$ component is almost unchanged. In the Li-ion cell using a MCMB anode and a composite cathode cycled between 2.5 V and 4.2 V, the structural changes are dominated by the spinel $LiMn_2O_4$ component, with much less changes in the layered $LiNi_{1/3}Co_{1/3}Mn_{1/3}O_2$ component, comparing with the Li-half cell results. These results give us valuable information about the structural changes relating to the contributions of each individual component to the cell capacity at certain charge/discharge state, which are helpful in designing and optimizing the composite cathode using spinel- and layered-type materials for Li-ion battery research. More detailed discussion will be presented at the meeting.

• Journal of Radiation Protection and Research
• /
• v.14 no.2
• /
• pp.10-17
• /
• 1989

A study for the assessment of dose given by outdoor radon to respiratory system has been carried out by making use of radon-cups containing CR-39 plastic track detectors. Detection efficiencies were determined by irradiation of the radon-cups in a standard radon chamber of known concentration. Thus determined detection factors of CR-39 plastic track detector in bare, open cup and filtered cup geometry are found to be 0.273, 0.0813 and 0.0371 $trmm^{-2}$/(37$Bqm^{-3}{\cdot}d$), respectively, which are chemically etched in 30% NaOH solution of $70^{\circ}C$ for 220 minutes. The outdoor radon concentrations measured at Taejeon(Chungnam National University) from May 1988 to March 1989 are in the range of 27.4 - 135.8 Bq/$m^3$(0.74 - 3.67pCi/l)by open cup and 16.7 - 143.9 Bq/$m^3$(0.45 - 3.89 pCi/l) by filtered cup, which yield overall annual average value of outdoor radon concentration of $70.8Bq/m^3$(1.91 pCi/l). Corresponding effective dose equivalent rate to respiratory system of ICRP standard man is assessed to be 520 nSv /h.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
• /
• v.7 no.11
• /
• pp.1597-1609
• /
• 2004

A lot of lipreading system has been proposed to compensate the rate of speech recognition dropped in a noisy environment. Previous lipreading systems work on some specific conditions such as artificial lighting and predefined background color. In this paper, we propose a real-time lipreading system which allows the motion of a speaker and relaxes the restriction on the condition for color and lighting. The proposed system extracts face and lip region from input video sequence captured with a common PC camera and essential visual information in real-time. It recognizes utterance words by using the visual information in real-time. It uses the hue histogram model to extract face and lip region. It uses mean shift algorithm to track the face of a moving speaker. It uses PCA(Principal Component Analysis) to extract the visual information for learning and testing. Also, it uses HMM(Hidden Markov Model) as a recognition algorithm. The experimental results show that our system could get the recognition rate of 90% in case of speaker dependent lipreading and increase the rate of speech recognition up to 40～85% according to the noise level when it is combined with audio speech recognition.

• Journal of the Korea Computer Graphics Society
• /
• v.27 no.1
• /
• pp.9-17
• /
• 2021

In this paper, we present a simple and fast supervised learning framework based on model predictive control so as to learn motion controllers for a physic-based character to track given example motions. The proposed framework is composed of two components: training data generation and offline learning. Given an example motion, the former component stochastically controls the character motion with an optimal controller while repeatedly updating the controller for tracking the example motion through model predictive control over a time window from the current state of the character to a near future state. The repeated update of the optimal controller and the stochastic control make it possible to effectively explore various states that the character may have while mimicking the example motion and collect useful training data for supervised learning. Once all the training data is generated, the latter component normalizes the data to remove the disparity for magnitude and units inherent in the data and trains an artificial neural network with a simple architecture for a controller. The experimental results for walking and running motions demonstrate how effectively and fast the proposed framework produces physics-based motion controllers.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Railway
• /
• v.13 no.1
• /
• pp.119-124
• /
• 2010

Light rail is an electric railway system, characterized by its ability to operate single or multiple car consists (trains) along exclusive rights-of-way at ground level, on aerial structures, in subways or in streets, able to board and discharge passengers at station platforms or at street, track, or car-floor level and normally powered by overhead electrical wires. Depending upon the specific system, the light rail lends some major advantages to urban settings. The evaluation of light rail technology as a potential component of regional transit systems has been the subject of extensive studies throughout the country in the past decade. For the study, feasibility was defined as "the ability of an LRT system to achieve certain level of transportation market in comparison with other transportation alternatives." This paper describes the feasibility study to evaluate a proposed light rail development project. The minimum are those LRT systems that would met to make a project feasible for further evaluation.

• Journal of Ocean Engineering and Technology
• /
• v.26 no.1
• /
• pp.41-46
• /
• 2012

A deep-sea manganese nodule miner consists of 4 parts: the pickup device, crusher, disposal device, and tracked vehicle. The tracked vehicle is an essential component to keep the self-propelled miner moving across deep-sea soil. The performances of the tracked vehicle are influenced by noise factors: the shear strength of the seafloor, bottom current, seafloor slope, track speed, reaction forces of flexible hose, etc. It is necessary to adopt a robust design method that improves the performances and minimizes the variation caused by noise factors. Taguchi's method, the most widely known robust design method, searches for the robust optimum using an orthogonal array composed of the product of the inner array and outer array. In this paper, we propose a new screening technique to reduce the number of input factors and apply the MRSN (Multi-Response Signal to Noise) ratio to convert multiple performances into single one in order to overcome the difficulties and limitations of using Taguchi's method in a case with many input factors and multiple performances. A test miner was already designed and tested. It has about 1/10 the capacity of a commercial one and was successfully operated at an in-shore area. Taguchi's robust design was applied to the tracked vehicle of the test miner, and design improvements were implemented for the vehicle.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
• /
• v.41 no.6
• /
• pp.155-164
• /
• 2004

Recently, we have remarkable developments in intelligent robot systems. The remarkable features of intelligent robot are that it can track user and is able to doface recognition, which is vital for many surveillance-based systems. The advantage of face recognition compared with other biometrics recognition is that coerciveness and contact that usually exist when we acquire characteristics do not exist in face recognition. However, the accuracy of face recognition is lower than other biometric recognition due to the decreasing in dimension from image acquisition step and various changes associated with face pose and background. There are many factors that deteriorate performance of face recognition such as thedistance from camera to the face, changes in lighting, pose change, and change of facial expression. In this paper, we implement a new sliding active camera system to prevent various pose variation that influence face recognition performance andacquired frontal face images using PCA and HMM method to improve the face recognition. This proposed face recognition algorithm can be used for intelligent surveillance system and mobile robot system.