• Journal of Korea Technical Association of The Pulp and Paper Industry
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• v.46 no.1
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• pp.18-28
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• 2014

Renewable Portfolio Standards(RPS) is a regulation that requires a renewable energy generated from eco-friendly energy sources such as biomass, wind, solar, and geothermal. The RPS mechanism generally is an obligatory policy that places on electricity supply companies to produce a designated fraction of their electricity from renewable energies. The domestic companies to supply electricity largely rely on wood pellets in order to implement the RPS in spite of undesirable situation of lack of wood resources in Korea. This means that the electricity supply companies in Korea must explore new biomass as an alternative to wood. Palm kernel shell (PKS) and empty fruit bunch (EFB) as oil palm wastes can be used as raw materials used for making pellets after their thermochemical treatment like torrefaction. Torrefaction is a pretreatment process which serves to improve the properties including heating value and energy densification of these oil palm wastes through a mild pyrolysis at temperature typically ranging between 200 and $300^{\circ}C$ in the absence of oxygen under atmospheric pressure. Torrefaction of oil palms wastes at above $200^{\circ}C$ contributed to the increase of fixed carbon with the decrease of volatile matters, leading to the improvement of their calorific values over 20.9 MJ/kg (=5,000 kcal/kg) up to 25.1 MJ/kg (=6,000 kcal/kg). In particular, EFB sensitively responded to torrefaction because of its physical properties like fiber bundles, compared to PKS and hardwood chips. In conclusion, torrefaction treatment of PKS and EFB can greatly contribute to the implement of RPS of the electricity supply companies in Korea through the increased co-firing biomass with coal.

• Journal of the Korean Wood Science and Technology
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• v.42 no.3
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• pp.258-265
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• 2014

By replacing the previous metal connector on the joints of timber structure, the GFRP reinforced laminated wooden pin was produced using a wooden material and Glass fiber reinforced plastic(GFRP) composite laminate. In addition, using the reinforced wooden pin, the tensile type shear strength test was conducted. Based on the result of the bending strength test of the reinforced laminated wooden pin according to the GFRP arrangement, a specimen(Type-A) with a single insertion of GFRP for each layer have shown the most favorable performance. Also, it was verified that densified specimen hot pressed for an hour at the temperature of $150^{\circ}C$ and with the oppression pressure $1.96N/mm^2$ have shown the improved performance of 1.57 times than the specimen without the densification. And in the bending strength test considering the load direction, edgewise have shown a higher performance of 3.51 times than the flatwise. A shear strength test was conducted using the Type-A reinforced laminated wooden pin which have shown a moderate performance on the test. Based on the test conducted by differentiating the type of the joint plate and the connector, compared to the specimen(Type-DS) applied with the drift pin and steel plate, the specimen( Type-WL) applied with the GFRP reinforced laminated wooden pin and GFRP reinforced wooden laminated plate have shown 1.12 times higher shear strength and also have shown an excellent toughness even after the maximum load.