• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.36 no.5
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• pp.417-426
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• 2024

Shield tunneling method is widely used to build tunnels in complex geological environment. Stability control of tunnel face is the key to the safety of projects. To improve the excavation efficiency or perform equipment maintenance, the excavation chamber sometimes is not fully filled with support medium, which can reduce the load and increase tunneling speed while easily lead to ground collapse. Due to the high risk of the face failure under non-fully support mode, the tunnel face stability should be carefully evaluated. Whether compressive air is required for compensation and how much air pressure should be provided need to be determined accurately. Based on the upper bound theorem of limit analysis, a non-fully support rotational failure model is developed in this study. The failure mechanism of the model is verified by numerical simulation. It shows that increasing the density of supporting medium could significantly improve the stability of tunnel face while the increase of tunnel diameter would be unfavorable for the face stability. The critical support ratio is used to evaluate the face failure under the nonfully support mode, which could be an important index to determine whether the specific unsupported height could be allowed during shield tunneling. To avoid of face failure under the non-fully support mode, several charts are provided for the assessment of compressed air pressure, which could help engineers to determine the required air pressure for face stability.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers B
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• v.36 no.2
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• pp.181-188
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• 2012

The present study on nitrogen-diluted non-premixed counterflow flames with finite burner diameters experimentally investigates the important role of the outer edge flame in flame extinction. Flame stability diagrams mapping the flame extinction response of nitrogen-diluted non-premixed counterflow flames to varying global strain rates in terms of the burner diameter, burner gap, and velocity ratio are explored. There exists a critical nitrogen mole fraction beyond which the flame cannot be sustained, and also the curves of the critical nitrogen mole fraction versus the global strain rate have C-shapes in terms of burner diameter, burner gap, and velocity ratio. In flames with sufficiently high strain rates, the curves of the critical nitrogen mole fractions versus global strain rate collapse into one curve, and the flames can have the 1-D flame response of typical diffusion flames. Three flame extinction modes are identified: flame extinctions through the shrinkage of the outer edge flame with and without an oscillation of the outer edge flame prior to the extinction and flame extinction through a flame hole at the flame center. The measured flame surface temperature and a numerical evaluation of the fractional contribution of each term in the energy equation show that the radial conductive heat loss at the flame edge destabilizes the outer edge flame, and the conductive and convection heat addition to the outer edge from the trailing diffusion flame stabilizes the outer edge flame. The radial conductive heat loss at the flame edge is the dominant extinction mechanism acting through the shrinkage of the outer edge flame.

• International Commerce and Information Review
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.341-366
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• 2013

The term, Mittelstand, has no exact english translation for the definition, but, today, Mittelstand refers to small and medium-sized enterprises(SME), mostly family-owned firms in Germany. The Mittelstand is called the backbone of the German economy because it drove the economic miracle after World War II. During the global recession and the euro zone's debt crisis in recent years, in which european businesses have faced the near-collapse of competitiveness particularly in manufacturing, the German exports are booming and exceeded exports of China in 2012. Most importantly, the Germany economic performance has been widely attributed to the strength of the Mittelstand. Many of countries, even some leading public companies are seeking to emulate the success of the Mittelstand. Investors evaluate that many of Germany's investable "hidden champions" are Mittelstand companies. The purpose of this study is to present some of answers to the following questions: Firstly, what makes the German Mittelstand so successful? Secondly, what does the success of the German Mittelstand mean for the Korean SMEs in global competitiveness? Thirdly, what Korean government has to do improve the global competitiveness of the Korean SMEs? Some discussions in this study mention the managerial implications for Korean exporting SMEs particularly in manufacturing. Several factors that account for the success of the German Mittelstand are technological excellence and the tradition of family-owned management, concentration on niche market and globalization, and institutional supports. There are some of important lessons to be learned from the German Mittelstand. If the purposes of Korean SMEs want to remain in the sustainable competitive advantage and withstand unforeseen economic turbulences in the future, they must be able to meet the followings: 1) Technology that meets the global standard or exceeding it 2) Competitiveness in price in the global market 3) Active involvement in the globalization process, utilizing various entry modes Innovative products at globally competitive price are a crucial point for Korean exporting SMEs to achieve their competitive edge over others in the target markets abroad. It is time for Korean SMEs to cultivate a core competence in manufacturing in order to position Korea as a global manufacturing hub with SMEs leading.

• Journal of the Society of Naval Architects of Korea
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• v.36 no.4
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• pp.137-146
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• 1999

Inspection becomes to be important in the safety of structure and economical viewpoint, because structural damage accompanies lots of economical cost and social problems. Especially ship structure is composed of a lot of members and it is impossible to inspect all members continuously. The purpose of this paper is to get optimal inspection plan containing inspection time and method. Crack is one of major modes on the structural failure and can lead to collapse of structure. In this paper, the deteriorating process, which contains inspection to detect the crack before the propagation to large crack, is idealized as Markov chain model. Genetic algorithm is also used to accomplish the optimization of inspection plan. Especially, the probabilistic characteristics of cracks are changed, because ship is operating in corrosive environments and the scantling of structural members is reduced due to corrosion. Non-stationary Markov chain model is used to represent the process of corrosion in structural members. In this paper, the characteristics of indivisual inspection plan are compared by numerical examples for the change of corrosion rate, the cost due to scheduled system down and target failure probability. From the numerical example, it can be seen that the improvement of fatigue life for the members with short fatigue life is the most effective way in order to reduce total maintenance cost.

• International Journal of High-Rise Buildings
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.345-364
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• 2021

Developments in the understanding of fire behaviour for large open-plan spaces typical of tall buildings have been greatly outpaced by the rate at which these buildings are being constructed and their characteristics changed. Numerous high-profile fire-induced failures have highlighted the inadequacy of existing tools and standards for fire engineering when applied to highly-optimised modern tall buildings. With the continued increase in height and complexity of tall buildings, the risk to the occupants from fire-induced structural collapse increases, thus understanding the performance of complex structural systems under fire exposure is imperative. Therefore, an accurate representation of the design fire for open-plan compartments is required for the purposes of design. This will allow for knowledge-driven, quantifiable factors of safety to be used in the design of highly optimised modern tall buildings. In this paper, we review the state-of-the-art experimental research on large open-plan compartment fires from the past three decades. We have assimilated results collected from 37 large-scale compartment fire experiments of the open-plan type conducted from 1993 to 2019, covering a range of compartment and fuel characteristics. Spatial and temporal distributions of the heat fluxes imposed on compartment ceilings are estimated from the data. The complexity of the compartment fire dynamics is highlighted by the large differences in the data collected, which currently complicates the development of engineering tools based on physical models. Despite the large variability, this analysis shows that the orders of magnitude of the thermal exposure are defined by the ratio of flame spread and burnout front velocities (V_S / V_BO), which enables the grouping of open-plan compartment fires into three distinct modes of fire spread. Each mode is found to exhibit a characteristic order of magnitude and temporal distribution of thermal exposure. The results show that the magnitude of the thermal exposure for each mode are not consistent with existing performance-based design models, nevertheless, our analysis offers a new pathway for defining thermal exposure from realistic fire scenarios in large open-plan compartments.

• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.297-317
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• 1994

This study demonstrates the changes in the spatial organization of Korea by the construction of Seoul-Pusan railroad. This Seoul-Pusan line, which is the most important one in Korea was constructed in 1905. The original plan of the line was selected to cross the main traditional roads to control the entire Korean peninsular and to mobilize the Korean commercial potentials. It was the line to exploit the staples and to expand the Japanese market in Korea. In accordance with the contracts between Japan and Korean government, Korean government had to supply the lands for railroad, office, and service facilities. That was one of the important reasons that Korean government had been broken down. The main findings of this study are as follows: 1. The Seoul-Pusan railroad line was constructed Japanese colonial policy which emphasized three main purposes; the first was to reorganize the economic space and to collapse the traditional Korean markets for Japanese ruling, and the second was to find out the military supply routes, and the third was to search for the transcontinental line for China and Siberia. As the results, the old Korean pedestrian routes, which were the Eastern, the mid, the westren, and the Samnam route lost their functions. 2. Japanese requested for Korean government usually ten times of wider space for the site of stations than the needed one. The land was expropriated, and constructed the new centers aparted from the original Korean towns. In this process Japanese got the most developmental and windfall profits. The newly constructed centers were for Japanese immigration and the town service facilities which would be used to control the Korean financial market. At last, they easily converted the Korean spatial economy into Japanese colonial one, which made to reinforce the sphere of Seoul-Pusan line. 3. Japanese planned the stations as the central points in Korea. So the railroad stations were located apart from the centers of towns, to avoid the Korean resistances, and to maximize their profits. The mean distance from staiton to 'the town center is about 1km while the Japanese case is 0.6km. 4. The pattern of present Korean railroads is not the 'X type'. Because the Honam line is not the trunk one. So, we could call the Korean railroad pattern as the 'Ip(Chinese character 入) type' . The operational effects of Seoul-Pusan line brought out the concentration of the national economy to this line as Japanese planned. And the polorization had occurred between this line and the other parts of Korea. For twenty years (1910-1930), the transported freights were increased about 5 times. In 1930, the total freight of Seoul-Pusan line became 2, 010, 444 metric tons. If we examine this process, the underconstructing Seoul-Pusan express electric railroad should avoid adjacent this line to reduce the regional and ecological imbalance. 5. The forms of centers on the Seoul-Pusan line were classified into six types in relation to station, town center, and built-up area; the compact (integrated) type, the elongated one, the splited (independent) one, the absorbed one, the consolidated one, and the declined one. All types of these towns might be developed in accordance with the centrality, railroad function, and the other transportational functions. 6. The Seoul-Pusan line plays the most important role among Korean railroads but the ratio of passenger and freight become lower because the effiects of other inaugurated railoads the different transportation modes such as trucks and cars would be got more merits in competition. 7. The results of cluster analyses on the cities of railroad stations showed the rudimentary urban systems in 1910 and 1930. In 1930, the cities were classified into three groups; the group of small cites, the intermediate (developing) city-group, and the special city-group. In 1930s the spatial organization and urban system of Korea were similar to the present ones. We call appreciate that these were the effects of the Seoul-Pusan line.