• KEPCO Journal on Electric Power and Energy
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.323-330
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• 2019

The 500 MW Korean standard coal-fired power plant is the largest standardized power plant in Korea and has played a pivotal role in domestic power generation for over 20 years. In addition to the aging degradation due to long term operation, the probability of failure of power generation facilities is increasing due to frequent startup and stop caused by the lower utilization rate due to air pollution problem caused by coal-fired power plants. Among them, steam piping plays an important role in transferring high-temperature & pressure steam produced in a boiler to turbine for power generation. In recent years, failure of steam piping of large coal-fired power plant has frequently occurred. Therefore, in this study, failure analysis of high pressure piping weld was conducted. We identify the damage caused by high stress due to abnormal supporting structure of the piping and suggest improved supporting structure to eliminate high stress through microstructure analysis and piping stress analysis to prevent the occurrence of the similar failure of other power plant in the case of repetitive damage to the main steam piping system of the 500 MW Korean standard coal-fired power plant.

• KEPCO Journal on Electric Power and Energy
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.133-141
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• 2016

Although construction of any new nuclear power projects had not been launched since mid-1970s until recently in the USA, many new nuclear power plants have been constructed in many countries with the support of their governments mainly as part of their national energy security and electric source diversification policies. For many reasons, the nuclear power industry seemed to reclaim their renaissance from the beginning of this century and the investment in the nuclear power projects draw positive concern from the private financial sector. But the global financial crisis in 2008 and subsequent economic slow-down together with tighter bank credit regulations caused commercial banks, the main source of financing, to lose appetite for investing in new nuclear power projects. But the nuclear power economics shows that the nuclear power is viable in terms of the environmental benefit and long-term average cost compared to other power generation sources. Also doubt about nuclear power safety was much mitigated due to technology development and reinforced safety-related tests and monitoring. Therefore, the prospect for nuclear power market expansion remains positive although there are comparatively big differences among different scenarios. After Korea Electric Power Corp. won the UAE nuclear power project in December of 2009, the competition in nuclear power markets is undergoing huge changes. Competitors backed by the support of their own governments are now entering the market with many aggressive and innovative financing packages to win bids of new nuclear power projects. This report analyzed the nuclear power market prospects, competitive edges of nuclear power, risk management measures, and financing challenges and recommends alternative solutions to promote competitive edges in winning bids of new nuclear power projects.

• KEPCO Journal on Electric Power and Energy
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.149-156
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• 2019

In the field of maintenance of power transmission lines, drones have been used for their patrol and inspection by KEPCO since 2017. This drone technology was originally developed by KEPCO Research Institute, and now workers from four regional offices of KEPCO have directly applied this technology to the drone patrol and inspection tasks. In the drone inspection system, a drone with an optical zooming camera and a thermal camera can fly automatically along the transmission lines by the ground control system developed by KEPCO Research Institute, but its camera gimbal has been remotely controlled by a field worker. Especially the drone patrol and inspection has been mainly applied for the transmission lines in the inaccessible areas such as regions with river-crossings, sea-crossings and mountains. There are often communication disruptions between the drone and its remote controller in such extreme fields of mountain areas with many barriers. This problem may cause the camera gimbal be out of control, even though the inspection drone flies along the flight path well. In addition, interference with the reception of real-time transmitted videos makes the field worker unable to operate it. To solve these problems, we have developed the auto-tracking camera gimbal system with deep learning method. The camera gimbal can track the transmission line automatically, even when the transmitted video on a remote controller is intermittently unavailable. To show the effectiveness of our camera gimbal system, its field test results will be presented in this paper.

• Journal of Climate Change Research
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.105-114
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• 2013

Recently, foreign direct investment of Korea has increased significantly. Foreign direct investment is motivated by various reasons and renewable energy investments in foreign countries can be performed by many causes. Korean companies can enjoy the export of products, related EPC contracts, acquisition of the knowledge of the project management technique, pre-occupying effect of the market and profit itself. Wind power projects have biggest share in the investment amounts among the renewable energy business. So, in this study, one wind farm project was selected and supposed to be invested in China, USA, Germany and UK at the same time and the effect of electricity price, corporate income tax, inflation rate and interest rate of debt were analyzed. The result showed that investing in Germany is most profitable because of the highest electricity price and electricity price and debt interest rate are the most sensitive factors for IRR. This approach would be helpful to make decisions in investing foreign wind power projects.

• KEPCO Journal on Electric Power and Energy
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.115-123
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• 2018

Various types of robots running on power transmission lines have been developed for the purpose of line patrol monitoring. They usually have complex mechanism to run and avoid obstacles on the power line, but nevertheless did not show satisfactory performance for going over the obstacles. Moreover, they were so heavy that they could not be easily installed on the lines. To compensate these problems, flying robots have been developed and recently, multi-copter drones with flight stability have been used in the electric power industry. The drones could be remotely controlled by human operators to monitor power distribution lines. In the case of transmission line patrol, however, transmission towers are huge and their spans are very long, and thus, it is very difficult for the pilot to control the patrol drones with the naked eye from a long distance away. This means that the risk of a drone crash onto electric power facilities always resides. In addition, there exists another danger of electromagnetic interference with the drones on autopilot waypoint tracking under ultra-high voltage environments. This paper presents a patrol monitoring plan of autopilot drones for power transmission lines and its field tests. First, the magnetic field effect on an autopilot patrol drone is investigated. Then, how to build the flight path to avoid the magnetic interference is proposed and our autopilot drone system is introduced. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed patrol plan is confirmed through its field test results in the 154 kV, 345 kV and 765 kV transmission lines in Chungcheongnam-do.

• KEPCO Journal on Electric Power and Energy
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.25-32
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• 2019

K-BEMS System was introduced to reduce peak load and to save total energy of the 200 buildings that KEPCO headquarter and branch offices use. And K-BEMS system is composed of PV, battery, and hybrid PCS. KEPCO research institute has carried out this K-BEMS research project for 3 years since January 2016. In this paper, the results of the project are shown. 9 modes of test results of K-BEMS system and are operational problems were analyzed. And measures to cure the trouble are also suggested. Batteries are operated more than 20% of SOC, and less than 20% of SOC battery protection switches are automatically shutting down the system and the system no longer respond to EMS, ending the supply of PV, and so therefore to continue the PV power supply it was turn out to be necessary that the EMS should automatically change its policy to change PV only supply mode automatically when the Battery Switch automatically operated. To operate the system continuously and automatically, it is necessary to modify the minimum operational SOC value, and in addition to that the EMS computer must remember the last shut-down SOC and Voltage which interrupted the system and add some margin to reflect the measurement error in the system.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.21 no.12
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• pp.52-59
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• 2020

Currently, the domestic electricity rates for houses are charged by applying a progressive level according to monthly electricity usage. Electricity rates rise sharply wWhen the amount of electricity used is large, electricity rates rise sharply. The standardized electricity rate progressive system has limitations in that it lacks consideration of the consumers' power usage patterns and limits consumers' their options. Accordingly, the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy and the Korea Electric Power Corporation have been demonstrating the basis of a rate system for housing, which is a method of charging electricity according to the amount of electricity used by season and time. In this paper, 10 electricity usage patterns were derived through from AMI data analysis for 5 five years of 362 apartment complexes located in metropolitan cities. The patterns were, and then applied to the existing domestic electricity rate and time-by-time rates applied to demonstrations, and by time-by-time rates in the US and Australia. The effect of the optional rate by pattern was compared and analyzed. As a result, it was confirmed that benefits occurred in five5 patterns compared to existing rate plans, and the electricity rates increased in 5 five patterns, and t. This phenomenon shows the same phenomenon withis the same as the overseas rates, including domestic rates being demonstrated.

• Journal of Korean Society of Transportation
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.113-132
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• 2003

Using nonradial data envelopment analysis(DEA) under assumptions of strong disposability and variable returns scale, this paper annually estimates productive. technical and allocative efficiencies of three publicly-owned rail transit properties which are different in terms of organizational type: Seoul Subway Corporation(SSC, local public corporation), the Seoul Metropolitan Electrified Railways sector (SMESRS) of Korea National Railroad(the national railway operator controlled by the Ministry of Construction and Transportation(MOCT)), and Busan Urban Transit Authority (BUTA, the national authority controlled by MOCT). Using the estimation results of Tobit regression analysis. the paper next computes their true productive, true technical and true allocative efficiencies, which reflect only the impacts of internal factors such as production activity by removing the impacts of external factors such as an organizational type and a track utilization rate. And the paper also computes an organizational efficiency and annually gross efficiencies for each property. The paper then conceptualized that the property produces a single output(car-kilometers) using four inputs(labor, electricity, car & maintenance and track) and uses unbalanced panel data consisted of annual observations on SSC, SMESRS and BUTA. The results obtained from DEA show that, on an average, SSC is the most efficient property on the productive and allocative sides, while SMESRS is the most technically-efficient one. On the other hand. BUTA is the most efficient one on the truly-productive and allocative sides, while SMESRS on the truly-technical side. Another important result is that the differences in true efficiency estimates among the three properties are considerably smaller than those in efficiency estimates. Besides. the most cost-efficient organizational type appears to be a local public corporation represented by SSC, which is also the most grossly-efficient property. These results suggest that a measure to sort out the impacts of external factors on the efficiency of rail transit properties is required to assess fairly it, and that a measure to restructure (establish) an existing(a new) rail transit property into a local public corporation(or authority) is required to improve its cost efficiency.

• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.43 no.1
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• pp.67-79
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• 2010

Korea water resources corporation (K-Water) has developed the real-time water resources management system for the Nakdong and the Geum River basin to efficiently operate multi-purpose dams in the basins. This study has extended to the Han River basin for providing an effective ending target storage of a month to the real-time water resources management system using Sampling Stochastic Dynamic Programming (SSDP), consequently increasing the efficiency of the reservoir system. The optimization model were developed for three reservoirs, named Soyang, Chungju, and Hwacheon, with high priority in terms of the amounts of effective capacity and water supply for the basin. The number of storage state variable for each dam to set an optimization problem has been assigned from the results of sensitivity analysis. Compared with the K-water operating policy with the target water supply elevations, the optimization model suggested in this study showed that the shortfalls are decreased by 37.22 MCM/year for the required water demands in the basin, even increasing 171 GWh in hydro electronic power generation. In addition, the result of a reservoir operating system during the drawdown period applied to real situation demonstrates that additional releases for water quality or hydro electronic power generation would be possible during the drawdown period between 2007 and 2008. On the basis of these simulation results, the applicability of the SSDP model and the reservoir operating system is proved. Therefore, the more efficient reservoir operation can be achieved if the reservoir operating system is extended further to other Korean basins.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Building Construction
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.283-291
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• 2011

As the construction industry has recently been transformed by the emergence of ubiquitous and intelligent technology, there have been major changes in the management methods employed. Specifically, next-generation construction management systems have been developed that collect and analyze many pieces of information in real time by using various wireless sensors and networks. The purpose of this study is to understand the current status of Ubiquitous Sensor Networks (USN) in the construction sector, and to gain fundamental data for a system of measuring concrete curing temperature in a construction site that employs a USN. By investigating the application status of USN, it was confirmed that USN has mainly been applied to the maintenance of facilities, safety management, and quality control. In addition, a field experiment in which the curing temperature of concrete was measured using a USN was carried out to evaluate two systems with wireless sensor networks, and the applicability of these systems on site was confirmed. However, it is estimated that the embedded wireless sensor type is affected by metal equipment on site, internal battery of sensor and concrete depth, and studies to provide more stable system by USN are thus required.