• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.44-50
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• 2019

The underwater structures of landing pier are not easy to access and it is difficult to check the damage. Lately, typhoons and earthquakes have occurred frequently, which may cause damage to underwater structures of landing pier. In this study, to prevent collapse of underwater structures and to maintain systematically, the application method of FBG sensors and safety evaluation methods were studied. In order to confirm the application of the FBG sensor to the circular steel pipe used as a pile on the landing pier, we conducted laboratory tests and confirmed that the FBG sensor should be applied by welding. As a result of structural analysis of the landing pier structure, the optimal position of FBG sensor confirmed. The stresses on the dead load were calculated by structural analysis, the stresses on the live load were calculated by using the data obtained from the FBG sensor, and then the stress acting on the pile was calculated by adding the two stresses. The calculated stress was compared with the allowable stress to evaluate the safety of the pile. This study was carried out as a basic study to find a way to evaluate the safety of the landing pier in real time.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.261-268
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• 2004

Osteoporosis is a clinical condition in which the amount of bone tissue is reduced and the likelihood of fracture is increased. It is known that the electrical property of the bone is related to its density, and, in particular, the electrical resistance of the bone decreases as the bone loss increases. This implies that the electrical property of bone may be an useful parameter to diagnose osteoporosis, provided that it can be readily measured. The study attempted to evaluate the electrical conductivity of bone using a technique of electrical impedance tomography (EIT). It nay not be easy in general to get an EIT for the bone due to the big difference (an order of 2) of electrical properties between the bone and the surrounding soft tissue. In the present study, we took an adaptive mesh regeneration technique originally developed for the detection of two phase boundaries and modified it to be able to reconstruct the electrical conductivity inside the boundary provided that the geometry of the boundary was given. Numerical simulation was carried out for a tibia phantom, circular cylindrical phantom (radius of 40 mm) inside of which there is an ellipsoidal homeogenous tibia bone (short and long radius are 17 mm and 15 mm, respectively) surrounded by the soft tissue. The bone was located in the 15 mm above from the center of the circular cross section of the phantom. The electrical conductivity of the soft tissue was set to be 4 mS/cm and varies from 0.01 to 1 ms/cm for the bone. The simulation considered measurement errors in order to look into its effects. The simulated results showed that, if the measurement error was maintained less than 5 %, the reconstructed electrical conductivity of the bone was within 10 % errors. The accuracy increased with the electrical conductivity of the bone, as expected. This indicates that the present technique provides more accurate information for osteoporotic bones. It should be noted that tile simulation is based on a simple two phase image for the bone and the surrounding soft tissue when its anatomical information is provided. Nevertheless, the study indicates the possibility that the EIT technique may be used as a new means to detect the bone loss leading to osteoporotic fractures.