• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.55 no.4
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• pp.1244-1249
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• 2023

Recently, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) announced the development of first-of-a-kind(FOAK) and most advanced futuristic vertical city and named as 'The LINE'. The project will have zero carbon dioxide emissions and will be powered by clean energy sources. Therefore, a study was designed to understand which clean energy sources might be a better choice. Because of its nearly carbon-free footprint, nuclear energy may be a good choice. Nowadays, the development of very small modular reactors (vSMRs) is gaining attention due to many salient features such as cost efficiency and zero carbon emissions. These reactors are one step down to actual small modular reactors (SMRs) in terms of power and size. SMRs typically have a power range of 20 MWe to 300 MWe, while vSMRs have a power range of 1-20 MWe. Therefore, a study was conducted to discuss different vSMRs in terms of design, technology types, safety features, capabilities, potential, and economics. After conducting the comparative test and analysis, the fuel cycle modeling of optimal and suitable reactor was calculated. Furthermore, the levelized unit cost of electricity for each reactor was compared to determine the most suitable vSMR, which is then compared other generation SMRs to evaluate the cost variations per MWe in terms of size and operation. The main objective of the research was to identify the most cost effective and simple vSMR that can be easily installed and deployed.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.17 no.12
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• pp.3364-3382
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• 2023

Remote sensing image segmentation plays an important role in realizing intelligent city construction. The current mainstream segmentation networks effectively improve the segmentation effect of remote sensing images by deeply mining the rich texture and semantic features of images. But there are still some problems such as rough results of small target region segmentation and poor edge contour segmentation. To overcome these three challenges, we propose an improved semantic segmentation model, referred to as MRU-Net, which adopts the U-Net architecture as its backbone. Firstly, the convolutional layer is replaced by BasicBlock structure in U-Net network to extract features, then the activation function is replaced to reduce the computational load of model in the network. Secondly, a hybrid multi-scale recognition module is added in the encoder to improve the accuracy of image segmentation of small targets and edge parts. Finally, test on Massachusetts Buildings Dataset and WHU Dataset the experimental results show that compared with the original network the ACC, mIoU and F1 value are improved, and the imposed network shows good robustness and portability in different datasets.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.56 no.6
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• pp.2019-2028
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• 2024

Advanced nuclear reactors, especially the newly developed small and micro-reactors have complex neutron spectrum, which makes the deterministic reactor core calculations sensitive to the energy group structure of few-group cross-sections. To avoid significantly increasing the cost of energy discretization in the core calculation, two energy group structures with 31 groups and 33 groups were adopted for typical thermal and fast reactor cores, respectively. Then, an adaptive scheme of group division for reactor cores with a medium neutron spectrum was proposed. The works were based on the full spectrum nuclear reactor analysis code SARAX/TULIP. An equivalent one-dimensional model of the core was proposed to capture the key neutron spectrum features of the reactor core. Such features were used to adaptively determine a few-group structure for the following reactor core calculations. Then, the neutron spectrum in different zones with more details was calculated. With this spectrum, the cross-sections were condensed into the determined energy groups. Three tests based on different neutron spectrum were calculated to verify the schemes. The results show that using the adaptive energy group division scheme, the following core calculation can meet the accuracy requirement of different reactors with different neutron spectra.

• Tunnel and Underground Space
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.106-119
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• 2012

Roughness of rock joint has generally been characterized based upon geometrical aspects of a two-dimensional surface profile. The appropriate description of joint roughness, however, should consider the features of roughness mobilization at contact areas under normal and shear loads. In this study, direct shear tests were conducted on the replicas of tensile fractured gneiss joints and the influence of the shear direction on the shear behavior and effective roughness was examined. In this procedure, a joint surface was represented as a group of triangular planes, and the steepness of each plane was characterized using the concepts of the active and inactive micro-slope angles. The contact areas at peak strength which were estimated by a numerical method showed that the locations of the contact areas were mainly dependent on the distribution of the micro-slope angle and the shear behavior of joint was dominated by only the fractions with active micro-slope angles. Therefore, a three-dimensional coefficient for the quantification of rock joint roughness is proposed based on the distribution of active micro-slope angle: active roughness coefficient, $C_r$. Comparison of the active roughness coefficient and the peak shear strength obtained from the experiment suggests that the active roughness coefficient is the effective parameter to quantify the surface roughness and estimate the shear behavior of rock joint.

• Proceedings of the Korean Geotechical Society Conference
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• 2002.03a
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• pp.751-758
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• 2002

Boreholes that are drilled in soft or unconsolidated materials such as gravels and coals are prone to collapse. To maintain the hole, some kinds of casing pipes are needed. If thereby a plastic pipe e.g. PVC is used for the casing, Televiewer tool is still capable of detecting structural features such as fractures in the borehole wall behind the pipe, whereas other borehole-imaging logging devices such as BIPS (Borehole Image Processing System) and FMS(Formation Micro Scanner) won't provide any information about that. Televiewer's primary component is a piezoelectric transducer centered in the hole. It acts as both a transmitter and receiver, and sends an ultrasonic beam. That is reflected, in the same manner as the seismic wave propagation, from the both sides(inner and outer surfaces) of the casing pipe, transmits through the pipe and then reflected from the borehole wall. With an appropriate choice of time-windowing, it is possible to capture the returning signals from both the borehole wall and the outer side of casing pipe as well. A suite of laboratory tests were performed on various physical models composed of plastic pipes with different diameters. Although the amplitudes of returning signals were reduced to about half the usual value due to the transmission loss, the dynamic range of Televiewer tool was sufficient to observe the structural features behind the casing pipe. Besides, several representative case studies at various research areas in our country are presented. The results demonstrate the usefulness of the transmissivity of Televiewer acoustic km, which will assist in further structural interpretation.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Landscape Architecture
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• v.43 no.3
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• pp.101-113
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• 2015

The purpose of this study is increasing ventilation network usability for urban green space planning by enhancing its practicality and detail. A ventilation network feature extraction technique using roughness length($z_0$) was proposed. Continuously surfaced DZoMs generated from $z_0$(cadastral unit) using three interpolations(IDW, Spline, and Kriging) were compared to choose the most suitable interpolation method. Ventilation network features were extracted using the most suitable interpolation technique and studied with land cover and land surface temperature by spatial overlay comparison. Results show Kriging is most suitable for DZoM and feature extraction in comparison with IDW and Spline. Kriging based features are well fit to the land surface temperature(Landsat-7 ETM+) on summer and winter nights. Noteworthy is that the produced ventilation network appears to mitigate urban heat loads at night. The practical use of proposed ventilation network features are highly expected for urban green space planning, though strict validation and enhancement should follow. (1) $z_0$ enhancement, (2) additional ventilation network interpretation and editing, (3) linking disconnected ventilation network features, and (4) associated dataset enhancement with data integrity should technically preceded to enhance the applicability of a ventilation network for green space planning. The study domain will be expanded to the Seoul metropolitan area to apply the proposed ventilation network to green space planning practice.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Technology of Plasticity Conference
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• 2008.10a
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• pp.271-272
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• 2008

This paper is concerned with the prediction of micro structural changes of pearlitic steel wire during clod drawing. The most important microstructural aspects are ferrite/cementite interlamellar spacing, cementite shape and thickness, since those are crucial factors to determine the mechanical strength of pearlitic steel. In this study, a couple of new algorithms to predict the above microstructural changes are developed based on the deformation histories of macro material points obtained from finite element simulations for pearlitic steel wire drawing. Some predictions are shown. The special features of the algorithms developed in this study are discussed in details.

• Transactions on Control, Automation and Systems Engineering
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.32-37
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• 2002

Applications of scaled telemanipulation into micro or nano world that shows many different features from directly human interfaced tools have been increased continuously. Here, we have to consider many aspects of scaling such as force, position, and impedance. For instance, what will be the possible range of force and position scaling with a specific level of performance and stability\ulcorner This knowledge of feasible staling region can be critical to human operator safety. In this paper, we show the upper bound of the product of force and position scaling and simulation results of 1DOF scaled system by using the Llewellyn's unconditional stability in continuous and discrete domain showing the effect of sampling rate.

• International Journal of Industrial Entomology and Biomaterials
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.91-93
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• 2000

Insects have many excellent features and functions in their small bodies, such as hexapod walking, flapping flight, vision systems, sensory hairs, etc, and those characteristics can be thought as good models for many types of robots. Insects also will be good models far micro-machines because of its size. Insect behavior consists of simple reflex acts and programmed behavior, Some robots were made in order to clarify the emergent mechanism of insect behavior, Through some experiments it would be found that even if insect behavior consists of some simple action patterns, it looks intelligent through interactions its sensors and actuators with its complex environment. In the near futures small robots inspired by insects will be used in many fields of our life. I hope that insect-model based robots will play an active part in many fields and that they will make us happy.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2003.10a
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• pp.1309-1314
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• 2003

If an agent has a learning ability using previous knowledge, then it is expected that the agent can speed up learning by interacting with environment. In this paper, we present an improved reinforcement learning algorithm using domain knowledge which can be represented by problem-independent features and their classifiers. Here, neural networks are employed as knowledge classifiers. To show the validity of our proposed algorithm, computer simulations are illustrated, where navigation problem of a mobile robot and a micro aerial vehicle(MAV) are considered.