• International Journal of Reliability and Applications
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• 제5권4호
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• pp.115-128
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• 2004

Reliability of a power supply timber pole depends on complex combination of age, environmental factors involved in deterioration process ans inspection and maintenance actions influencing reliability and safety. In this paper soil and human factors are identified, models have been developed and analyzed for optimal maintenence decisions related to electrical power supply timber poles.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• 제3권1호
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• pp.35-48
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• 1995

This paper presents new frequency results for elliptical and semi-elliptical Mindlin plates of various aspect ratios, thicknesses and boundary conditions. The results were obtained using the recently developed computerized Rayleigh-Ritz method for thick plate analysis. For simply supported elliptical plates, it is proposed that the penalty function method be used to enforce the condition of zero rotation of the midplane normal in the tangent plane to the plate boundary.

• Asian-Australasian Journal of Animal Sciences
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• 제17권8호
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• pp.1168-1176
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• 2004

Intensive animal industries create large volumes of nutrient rich effluent, which, if untreated, has the potential for substantial environmental degradation. Aquatic plants in aerobic lagoon systems have the potential to achieve inexpensive and efficient remediation of effluent, and to recover valuable nutrients that would otherwise be lost. Members of the family Lemnaceae (duckweeds) are widely used in lagoon systems, but despite their widespread use in the cleansing of sewage, only limited research has been conducted into their growth in highly eutrophic media, and little has been done to systematically distinguish between different types of media. This study examined the growth characteristics of duckweed in abattoir effluent, and explored possible ways of ameliorating the inhibitory factors to growth on this medium. A series of pot trials was conducted to test the tolerance of duckweed to abattoir effluent partially remediated by a sojourn in anaerobic fermentation ponds, both in its unmodified form, and after the addition of acid to manipulate pH, and the addition of bentonite. Unmodified abattoir effluent was highly toxic to duckweed, although duckweed remained viable and grew sub optimally in media with total ammonia nitrogen (TAN) concentrations of up to 100 mg/l. Duckweed also grew vigorously in effluent diluted 1:4 v/v, containing 56 mg TAN/L and also modified by addition of acid to decrease pH to 7 and by adding bentonite (0.5%).

• BMB Reports
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• 제33권3호
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• pp.195-201
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• 2000

A human gene has been reported that may encode the enzyme acetohydroxyacid synthase. Previously this enzyme was thought to be absent from animals although it is present in plants and many microorganisms. In plants, this enzyme is the target of a number of commercial herbicides and the use of these compounds may need to be reassessed if the human enzyme exists and proves to be susceptible to inhibition. Here we report the construction of several plasmid vectors containing the cDNA sequence for this protein, and their expression in Escherichia coli. High levels of expression were observed, but most of the protein proved to be insoluble. The small amounts of soluble protein contained little or no acetohydroxyacid synthase activity. Attempts to refold the insoluble protein were successful insofar as the protein became soluble. However, the refolded protein did not gain any acetohydroxyacid synthase activity. In vivo complementation tests of an E. coli mutant produced no evidence that the protein is active. Incorrect folding, or the lack of another subunit, may explain the data but we favor the interpretation that this gene does not encode an acetohydroxyacid synthase.

• Journal of Preventive Medicine and Public Health
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• 제51권1호
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• pp.41-50
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• 2018

Objectives: To explore alcohol perceptions and their association hazardous alcohol use in the populations of Alberta, Canada and Queensland, Australia. Methods: Data from 2500 participants of the 2013 Alberta Survey and the 2013 Queensland Social Survey was analyzed. Regression analyses were used to explore the association between alcohol perceptions and its association with hazardous alcohol use. Results: Greater hazardous alcohol use was found in Queenslanders than Albertans (p<0.001). Overall, people with hazardous alcohol were less likely to believe that alcohol use contributes to health problems (odds ratio [OR], 0.46; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.27 to 0.78; p<0.01) and to a higher risk of injuries (OR, 0.54; 95% CI, 0.33 to 0.90; p<0.05). Albertans with hazardous alcohol use were less likely to believe that alcohol contributes to health problems (OR, 0.48; 95% CI, 0.26 to 0.92; p<0.05) and were also less likely to choose a highly effective strategy as the best way for the government to reduce alcohol problems (OR, 0.63; 95% CI, 0.43 to 0.91; p=0.01). Queenslanders with hazardous alcohol use were less likely to believe that alcohol was a major contributor to injury (OR, 0.39; 95% CI, 0.20 to 0.77; p<0.01). Conclusions: Our results suggest that people with hazardous alcohol use tend to underestimate the negative effect of alcohol consumption on health and its contribution to injuries. In addition, Albertans with hazardous alcohol use were less in favor of strategies considered highly effective to reduce alcohol harm, probably because they perceive them as a potential threat to their own alcohol consumption. These findings represent valuable sources of information for local health authorities and policymakers when designing suitable strategies to target alcohol-related problems.

• Asian-Australasian Journal of Animal Sciences
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• 제17권1호
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• pp.137-145
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• 2004

Intensive animal industries create large volumes of nutrient rich effluent which, if untreated, has the potential for substantial environmental degradationand to recover valuable nutrients that would otherwise be lost. Members of the family Lemnaceae are widely used in lagoon systems, to achieve inexpensive and efficient remediation of effluent. Only limited research has been conducted into their growth in highly eutrophic media and there has been little done to systematically distinguish between different types of media. This study examined the growth characteristics of duckweed in abattoir effluent and explored possible ways of ameliorating the inhibitory factors to growth on this medium. A series of pot trials was conducted to test the tolerance of duckweed to abattoir effluent partially remediated by a sojourn in anaerobic fermentation ponds, both in its unmodified form and after the addition of acid to manipulate pH, and the addition of bentonite. Unmodified abattoir effluent was highly toxic to duckweed, even at dilutions of 3:1. Duckweed remained viable and grew sub-optimally in simplified media with total ammonia nitrogen (TAN) concentrations of up to 100 mg/L. Duckweed grew vigorously in effluent diluted 1:4 v/v, containing 56 mg TAN/L when modified by addition of acid (to decrease pH to 7) and bentonite at 0.5%. The results of this study suggest that bentonite plays an important role in modifying the toxicity of abattoir effluent to duckweed.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• 제17권6호
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• pp.917-933
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• 2016

In a prestressed concrete bridge, the magnitude of the prestress force (PF) decreases with time. This unexpected loss can cause failure of a bridge which makes prestress force identification (PFI) critical to evaluate bridge safety. However, it has been difficult to identify the PF non-destructively. Although some research has shown the feasibility of vibration based methods in PFI, the requirement of having a determinate exciting force in these methods hinders applications onto in-service bridges. Ideally, it will be efficient if the normal traffic could be treated as an excitation, but the load caused by vehicles is difficult to measure. Hence it prompts the need to investigate whether PF and moving load could be identified together. This paper presents a synergic identification method to determine PF and moving load applied on a simply supported prestressed concrete beam via the dynamic responses caused by this unknown moving load. This method consists of three parts: (i) the PF is transformed into an external pseudo-load localized in each beam element via virtual distortion method (VDM); (ii) then these pseudo-loads are identified simultaneously with the moving load via Duhamel Integral; (iii) the time consuming problem during the inversion of Duhamel Integral is overcome by the load-shape function (LSF). The method is examined against different cases of PFs, vehicle speeds and noise levels by means of simulations. Results show that this method attains a good degree of accuracy and efficiency, as well as robustness to noise.

• Biotechnology and Bioprocess Engineering:BBE
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• 제9권4호
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• pp.245-251
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• 2004

The fungal species of Rhizopus oryzae 2062 has the capacity to carry out a single stage fermentation process for lactic acid production from potato starch wastewater. Starch hydrolysis, reducing sugar accumulation, biomass formation, and lactic acid production were affected with variations in pH, temperature, and starch source and concentration. A growth condition with starch concentration approximately 20 g/ L at pH 6.0 and 30$^{\circ}C$ was favourable for starch fermentation, resulting in a lactic acid yield of 78.3%∼85.5% associated with 1.5∼2.0 g/L fungal biomass produced in 36 h of fermentation.

• 한국소음진동공학회:학술대회논문집
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• 한국소음진동공학회 2007년도 추계학술대회논문집
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• pp.891-894
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• 2007

This study presents fault diagnosis of low speed bearing using support vector machine (SVM). The data used in the experiment was acquired using acoustic emission (AE) sensor and accelerometer. The aim of this study is to compare the performance of fault diagnosis based on AE signal and vibration signal with same load and speed. A low speed test rig was developed to simulate various defects with shaft speeds as low as 10 rpm under several loading conditions. In this study, component analysis was also performed to extract the feature and reduce the dimensionality of original data feature. Moreover, the classification for fault diagnosis was also conducted using original data feature without feature extraction. The result shows that extracted feature from AE sensor gave better performance in faults classification.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 제어로봇시스템학회 1994년도 Proceedings of the Korea Automatic Control Conference, 9th (KACC) ; Taejeon, Korea; 17-20 Oct. 1994
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• pp.747-752
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• 1994

Ussing's flux ratio theorem (1978) reflects a reciprocal relationship behavior between the unidirectional fluxes in asymmetric steady diffusion-convection in a membrane slab. This surprising result has led to many subsequent studies in a wide range of applications, in particular involving linear models of time dependent problems in biology and physiology. Ussing's theorem and its extensions are inherently linear in character. It is of considerable interest to ask to what extent these results apply, if at all, in situations involving, for example, nonlinear reaction. A physiologically interesting situation has been considered by Weisiger et at. (1989, 1991, 1992) and by McNabb et al. (1990, 1991) who studied the role of albumin in the transport of ligands across aqueous diffusion barriers in a liver membrane slab. The results are that there exist reciprocal relationships between unidirectional fluxes in the steady state, although albumin is chemically interacting in a nonlinear way of the diffusion processes. However, the results do not hold in general at early times. Since this type of study first started, it has been speculated about when and how the Ussing's flux ratio theorem fails in a general diffusion-convection-reaction system. In this paper we discuss the validity of Ussing-type theorems in time-dependent situations, and consider the limiting time behavior of a general nonlinear diffusion system with interaction.