• Korean Chemical Engineering Research
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• v.57 no.3
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• pp.425-431
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• 2019

As rechargeable metal-air batteries will be ideal energy storage devices in the future, an active cathode electrocatalyst is required with bi-functionality on both oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER) during discharge and charge, respectively. Here, a class of perovskite cathode catalyst with a micro-tubular structure has been developed by controlling bi-functionality from different Ru and Ni dopant ratios. A micro-tubular structure is achieved by the activated carbon fiber (ACF) templating method, which provides uniform size and shape. At the perovskite formula of $LaCrO_3$, the dual dopant system is successfully synthesized with a perfect incorporation into the single perovskite structure. The chemical oxidation states for each Ni and Ru also confirm the partial substitution to B-site of Cr without any changes in the major perovskite structure. From the electrochemical measurements, the micro-tubular feature reveals much more efficient catalytic activity on ORR and OER, comparing to the grain catalyst with same perovskite composition. By changing the Ru and Ni ratio, the $LaCr_{0.8}Ru_{0.1}Ni_{0.1}O_3$ micro-tubular catalyst exhibits great bi-functionality, especially on ORR, with low metal loading, which is comparable to the commercial catalyst of Pt and Ir. This advanced catalytic property on the micro-tubular structure and Ru/Ni synergy effect at the perovskite material may provide a new direction for the next-generation cathode catalyst in metal-air battery system.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.50 no.7
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• pp.1138-1147
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• 2018

Delayed hydride cracking (DHC) is an important failure mechanism for Zircaloy tubes in the demanding environment of nuclear reactors. The threshold stress intensity factor, $K_{IH}$, and critical hydride length, $l_C$, are important parameters to evaluate DHC. Theoretical models of them are developed for Zircaloy tubes undergoing non-homogenous temperature loading, with new stress distributions ahead of the crack tip and thermal stresses involved. A new stress distribution in the plastic zone ahead of the crack tip is proposed according to the fracture mechanics theory of second-order estimate of plastic zone size. The developed models with fewer fitting parameters are validated with the experimental results for $K_{IH}$ and $l_C$. The research results for radial cracking cases indicate that a better agreement for $K_{IH}$ can be achieved; the negative axial thermal stresses can lessen $K_{IH}$ and enlarge the critical hydride length, so its effect should be considered in the safety evaluation and constraint design for fuel rods; the critical hydride length $l_C$ changes slightly in a certain range of stress intensity factors, which interprets the phenomenon that the DHC velocity varies slowly in the steady crack growth stage. Besides, the sensitivity analysis of model parameters demonstrates that an increase in yield strength of zircaloy will result in a decrease in the critical hydride length $l_C$, and $K_{IH}$ will firstly decrease and then have a trend to increase with the yield strength of Zircaloy; higher fracture strength of hydrided zircaloy will lead to very high values of threshold stress intensity factor and critical hydride length at higher temperatures, which might be the main mechanism of crack arrest for some Zircaloy materials.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.11-20
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• 2019

The purpose of this study was to propose a new approach for quantifying in situ rock mass damage, which would include a degree-of-damage and the degraded strength of a rock mass, along with its prediction based on real-time Acoustic Emission (AE) observations. The basic approach for quantifying in-situ rock mass damage is to derive the normalized value of measured AE energy with the maximum AE energy, called the degree-of-damage in this study. With regard to estimation of the AE energy, an AE crack source location algorithm of the Wigner-Ville Distribution combined with Biot's wave dispersion model, was applied for more reliable AE crack source localization in a rock mass. In situ AE wave attenuation was also taken into account for AE energy correction in accordance with the propagation distance of an AE wave. To infer the maximum AE energy, fractal theory was used for scale-independent AE energy estimation. In addition, the Weibull model was also applied to determine statistically the AE crack size under a jointed rock mass. Subsequently, the proposed methodology was calibrated using an in situ test carried out in the Underground Research Tunnel at the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute. This was done under a condition of controlled incremental cyclic loading, which had been performed as part of a preceding study. It was found that the inferred degree-of-damage agreed quite well with the results from the in situ test. The methodology proposed in this study can be regarded as a reasonable approach for quantifying rock mass damage.

• International journal of steel structures
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.1336-1349
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• 2018

Generally, a precast prestressed concrete (PSC) beam is used as girders for short-to-medium span (less than 30 m) bridges due to the advantages of simple design and construction, reduction of construction budget, maintenance convenience. In order to increase the span length beyond 50 m of precast PSC girder, PSC hollow box girder with unbonded prestressed H-type steel beam placed at the compressive region is proposed. The unbonded compressive prestressing in the H-type steel beams in the girder is made to recover plastic deflection of PSC girder when the pre-stressing is released. Also, the H-steel beams allow minimization of depth-to-length ratio of the girder by reducing the compressive region of the cross-section, thereby reducing the weight of the girder. A quasi-static 3-point bending test with 4 different loading steps is performed to verify safety and plastic deflection recovery of the girder. The experimental results showed that the maximum applied load exceeded the maximum design load and most of the plastic deflection was recovered when the compressive prestressing of H-type steel beams is released. Also using prestressed H-type steel as compression reinforcements in the upper part of cross section, repair and restoration difficulty and cost of PSC girders should be significantly reduced. The study result and analysis are discussed in detail in the paper.

• The Korean Journal of Physiology and Pharmacology
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• v.25 no.5
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• pp.479-488
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• 2021

This study aimed to develop docetaxel (DTX) loaded poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA) nanoparticles (DTX-NPs) and to evaluate the different pharmacological sensitivity of NPs to MCF-7 and MDA-MB-231 breast cancer cells. NPs containing DTX or coumarin-6 were prepared by the nanoprecipitation method using PLGA as a polymer and d-α-tocopherol polyethylene glycol 1000 succinate (TPGS) as a surfactant. The physicochemical properties of NPs were characterized. In vitro anticancer effect and cellular uptake were evaluated in breast cancer cells. The particle size and zeta potential of the DTX-NPs were 160.5 ± 3.0 nm and -26.7 ± 0.46 mV, respectively. The encapsulation efficiency and drug loading were 81.3 ± 1.85% and 10.6 ± 0.24%, respectively. The in vitro release of DTX from the DTX-NPs was sustained at pH 7.4 containing 0.5% Tween 80. The viability of MDA-MB-231 and MCF-7 cells with DTX-NPs was 37.5 ± 0.5% and 30.3 ± 1.13%, respectively. The IC₅₀ values of DTX-NPs were 3.92- and 6.75-fold lower than that of DTX for MDA-MB-231 cells and MCF-7 cells, respectively. The cellular uptake of coumarin-6-loaded PLGA-NPs in MCF-7 cells was significantly higher than that in MDA-MB-231 cells. The pharmacological sensitivity in breast cancer cells was higher on MCF-7 cells than on MDA-MB-231 cells. In conclusion, we successfully developed DTX-NPs that showed a great potential for the controlled release of DTX. DTX-NPs are an effective formulation for improving anticancer effect in breast cancer cells.

• Current Applied Physics
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• v.18 no.11
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• pp.1458-1464
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• 2018

An improved method for the preparation of g-$C_3N_4$ is described. Currently, heating (> $400^{\circ}C$) of urea is the common method used for preparing the g-$C_3N_4$. We have found that sonication of melamine in $HNO_3$ solution, followed by washing with anhydrous ethanol, not only reduce the crystallite size of g-$C_3N_4$ but also facilitate intriguing electronic structure and photoluminescence (PL) properties. Moreover, loading of metal (Pt and Ag) nanoparticles, by applying the borohydride reduction method, has resulted in multicolor-emission from g-$C_3N_4$. With the help of PL spectra and local electronic structure study, at C K-edge, N K-edge, Pt L-edge and Ag K-edge by X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS), a precise mechanism of tunable luminescence is established. The PL mechanism ascribes the amendments in the transitions, via defect and/or metal states assimilation, between the ${\pi}^*$ states of tris-triazine ring of g-$C_3N_4$ and lone pair states of nitride. It is evidenced that interaction between the C/N 2p and metal 4d/5d orbitals of Ag/Pt has manifested a net detraction in the ${\delta}^*{\rightarrow}LP$ transitions and enhancement in the ${\pi}^*{\rightarrow}LP$ and ${\pi}^*{\rightarrow}{\pi}$ transitions, leading to broad PL spectra from g-$C_3N_4$ organic semiconductor compound.

• Korean Journal of Metals and Materials
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• v.46 no.9
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• pp.545-553
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• 2008

Dynamic deformation behavior of ultra-fine-grained pure coppers fabricated by equal channel angular pressing (ECAP) was investigated in this study. Dynamic torsional tests were conducted on four copper specimens using a torsional Kolsky bar, and then the test data were analyzed by their microstructures and tensile properties. The 1-pass ECAP'ed specimen consisted of fine dislocation cell structures elongated along the ECAP direction, which were changed to very fine, equiaxed subgrains of 300~400 nm in size as the pass number increased. The dynamic torsional test results indicated that maximum shear stress increased with increasing ECAP pass number. Adiabatic shear bands were not found at the gage center of the dynamically deformed torsional specimen of the 1- or 4-pass ECAP'ed specimen, while some weak bands were observed in the 8-pass ECAP'ed specimen. These findings suggested that the grain refinement according to the ECAP was very effective in strengthening of pure coppers, and that ECAP'ed coppers could be used without serious reduction in fracture resistance under dynamic torsional loading as adiabatic shear bands were hardly formed.

• Journal of radiological science and technology
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• v.45 no.2
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• pp.127-134
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• 2022

In order to overcome the image quality limitations of the conventional C-arm, a flat panel detector (FPD) is used to enhance spatial resolution, detective quantum efficiency, frame rate, and dynamic range. Three-dimensional (3D) visualized information can be obtained from C-arm computed tomography (CT) equipped with an FPD, which can reduce patient discomfort and provide various medical information to health care providers by conducting procedures in the interventional procedure room without moving the patient to the CT scan room. Unlike a conventional C-arm device, a C-arm CT requires different basic safety and essential performance evaluation criteria; therefore, in this study, basic safety and essential performance evaluation criteria to protect patients, medical staff, and radiologists were derived based on International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) standards, the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety (MFDS) standards in Korea, and the rules on the installation and operation of special medical equipment in Korea. As a result of the study, six basic safety evaluation criteria related to electrical and mechanical radiation safety (leakage current, collision protection, emergency stopping device, overheating, recovery management, and ingress of water or particulate matter into medical electrical (ME) equipment and ME systems: footswitches) and 14 essential performance evaluation criteria (accuracy of tube voltage, accuracy of tube current, accuracy of loading time, accuracy of current time product, reproducibility of radiation output, linearity and consistency in radiography, half layer value in X-ray equipment, focal size and collimator, relationship between X-ray field and image reception area, consistency of light irradiation versus X-ray irradiation, performance of the mechanical device, focal spot to skin distance accuracy, image quality evaluation, and technical characteristic of cone-beam computed tomography) were selected for a total of 20 criteria.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.664-671
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• 2021

This paper proposes a GPGPU structure that can reduce the number of operations and memory access by effectively applying a data reuse method to a convolutional neural network(CNN). Convolution is a two-dimensional operation using kernel and input data, and the operation is performed by sliding the kernel. In this case, a reuse method using an internal register is proposed instead of loading kernel from a cache memory until the convolution operation is completed. The serial operation method was applied to the convolution to increase the effect of data reuse by using the principle of GPGPU in which instructions are executed by the SIMT method. In this paper, for register-based data reuse, the kernel was fixed at 4×4 and GPGPU was designed considering the warp size and register bank to effectively support it. To verify the performance of the designed GPGPU on the CNN, we implemented it as an FPGA and then ran LeNet and measured the performance on AlexNet by comparison using TensorFlow. As a result of the measurement, 1-iteration learning speed based on AlexNet is 0.468sec and the inference speed is 0.135sec.

• The korean journal of orthodontics
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• v.52 no.3
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• pp.201-209
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• 2022

Objective: To compare the removal torque of microimplants upon post-use removal and post-retention removal and to assess the influencing factors. Methods: The sample group included 241 patients (age, 30.25 ± 12.2 years) with 568 microimplants. They were divided into the post-use (microimplants removed immediately after use or treatment) and post-retention (microimplants removed during the retention period) removal groups. The removal torque in both groups was assessed according to sex, age, placement site and method, and microimplant size. Pearson correlation and multiple linear regression analyses were performed for evaluating variables influencing the removal torque. Results: The mean period of total in-bone stay of microimplants in the post-retention removal group (1,237 days) was approximately two times longer than that in the post-use removal group (656.28 days). The removal torques in the post-retention removal group (range, 4-5 N cm) were also higher than those in the post-use removal group. The mandible and pre-drilling groups demonstrated higher placement and removal torques than did the maxilla and no-drilling groups, respectively. In the no-drilling post-use removal group, the placement torque and microimplant length positively correlated with the removal torque. In the post-retention removal group, unloading in-bone stay period and microimplant diameter positively correlated with the removal torque in the no-drilling and pre-drilling methods, respectively. Conclusions: The removal torques differed according to the orthodontic loading and removal time of microimplants. With prolonged retention of microimplants inserted using the no-drilling method, the removal torque was clinically acceptable and positively correlated with the unloading in-bone stay period.