• Journal of Preventive Medicine and Public Health
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• v.45 no.6
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• pp.344-352
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• 2012

Mercury is a toxic and non-essential metal in the human body. Mercury is ubiquitously distributed in the environment, present in natural products, and exists extensively in items encountered in daily life. There are three forms of mercury, i.e., elemental (or metallic) mercury, inorganic mercury compounds, and organic mercury compounds. This review examines the toxicity of elemental mercury and inorganic mercury compounds. Inorganic mercury compounds are water soluble with a bioavailability of 7% to 15% after ingestion; they are also irritants and cause gastrointestinal symptoms. Upon entering the body, inorganic mercury compounds are accumulated mainly in the kidneys and produce kidney damage. In contrast, human exposure to elemental mercury is mainly by inhalation, followed by rapid absorption and distribution in all major organs. Elemental mercury from ingestion is poorly absorbed with a bioavailability of less than 0.01%. The primary target organs of elemental mercury are the brain and kidney. Elemental mercury is lipid soluble and can cross the blood-brain barrier, while inorganic mercury compounds are not lipid soluble, rendering them unable to cross the blood-brain barrier. Elemental mercury may also enter the brain from the nasal cavity through the olfactory pathway. The blood mercury is a useful biomarker after short-term and high-level exposure, whereas the urine mercury is the ideal biomarker for long-term exposure to both elemental and inorganic mercury, and also as a good indicator of body burden. This review discusses the common sources of mercury exposure, skin lightening products containing mercury and mercury release from dental amalgam filling, two issues that happen in daily life, bear significant public health importance, and yet undergo extensive debate on their safety.

• Journal of Communications and Networks
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.126-132
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• 2015

In mobile computing research area, it is highly desirable to understand the characteristics of user movement so that the user friendly location aware services could be rendered effectively. Location based social networks (LBSNs) have flourished recently and are of great potential for movement behavior exploration and datadriven application design. While there have been some efforts on user check-in movement behavior in LBSNs, they lack comprehensive analysis of social influence on them. To this end, the social-spatial influence and social-temporal influence are analyzed synthetically in this paper based on the related information exposed in LBSNs. The check-in movement behaviors of users are found to be affected by their social friendships both from spatial and temporal dimensions. Furthermore, a probabilistic model of user mobile behavior is proposed, incorporating the comprehensive social influence model with extent personal preference model. The experimental results validate that our proposed model can improve prediction accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art social historical model considering temporal information (SHM+T), which mainly studies the temporal cyclic patterns and uses them to model user mobility, while being with affordable complexity.

• IMMUNE NETWORK
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• v.11 no.6
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• pp.376-382
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• 2011

Background: Carbon monoxide (CO) is a cytoprotective and homeostatic molecule with important signaling capabilities in physiological and pathophysiological situations. CO protects cells/tissues from damage by free radicals or oxidative stress. NAD(P)H:quinone oxidoreductase (NQO1) is a highly inducible enzyme that is regulated by the Kelch-like ECH-associated protein 1 (Keap1)/nuclear factor erythroid 2-related factor 2 (Nrf2)/antioxidant response element (ARE) pathway, which is central to efficient detoxification of reactive metabolites and reactive oxygen species (ROS). Methods: We generated NQO1 promoter construct. HepG2 cells were treated with CO Releasing Molecules-2 (CORM-2) or CO gas and the gene expressions were measured by RT-PCR, immunoblot, and luciferase assays. Results: CO induced expression of NQO1 in human hepatocarcinoma cell lines by activation of Nrf2. Exposure of HepG2 cells to CO resulted in significant induction of NQO1 in dose- and time-dependent manners. Analysis of the NQO1 promoter indicated that an antioxidant responsible element (ARE)-containing region was critical for the CO-induced Nrf2-dependent increase of NQO1 gene expression in HepG2 cells. Conclusion: Our results suggest that CO-induced Nrf2 increases the expression of NQO1 which is well known to detoxify reactive metabolites and ROS.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.60 no.7
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• pp.1299-1304
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• 2011

A wind turbine (WT) should be shut down as fast as possible to minimize its own damage in a storm-driven situation. Shutdown of a large wind farm requires a power grid to have a ramp-up capability large enough to balance between generation and consumption of electrical energy. This paper proposes a supervised shutdown algorithm of a wind farm to meet a required ramp-down rate in a grid code in the case of a storm-driven situation. The information on the speed and the direction of wind is measured at a wind mast (WM) installed around a wind farm. If the wind speed exceeds a cut-out speed, the number of WTs to be shut down simultaneously is decided to meet a required ramp-down rate of a grid-code. Arrival times to each WT from the WM are calculated and sorted in the order of time. Then a sequence of groups is generated. The shutdown start/end times of each group are decided to avoid superposition between adjacent two groups. The performance of the proposed shutdown algorithm is verified under various storm scenarios. Results indicate that the proposed algorithm can not only protect the wind farm in the case of a storm-driven situation but also meet the required ramp-down rate. In addition, the algorithm can produce more energy than that of a conventional shutdown algorithm.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.58 no.10
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• pp.1849-1854
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• 2009

This paper describes the design, evaluation and implementation of a compensating algorithm for an iron-cored measurement current transformer (CT) that removes the effects of the hysteresis characteristics of the iron-core. The exciting current resulting from the hysteresis characteristics of the core causes an error of the CT. The proposed algorithm decomposes the exciting current into the core loss current and the magnetizing current and each of them is estimated. The core loss current is calculated from the secondary voltage and the voltage-core loss current curve. The core flux linkage is calculated and then inserted into the flux-magnetizing current curve to estimate the magnetizing current. The exciting current at every sampling interval is obtained by summing the core loss and magnetizing currents and then added to the measured current to obtain the correct secondary current. The voltage-core loss current curve and flux-magnetizing current curves, which are different from the conventional curves, are derived in this paper. The performance of the proposed algorithm is validated under various conditions using EMTP generated data. The experimental test results of an iron-core type electronic CT, which consists of the iron-core and the compensation board, are also included. The results indicate that the proposed algorithm can improve the accuracy of the measurement CT significantly, and thus reduce the size and the cost of the CT.

• Industrial Engineering and Management Systems
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.233-240
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• 2012

The implementation of business process management (BPM) systems in large number of business organizations transforms BPM system into such a level of maturity and tends to collect large repositories of business process (BP) models. This issue encourages BP flexibility that leads to a large number of process variants derived from the same model, but differing in structure, to be stored in the large repositories of BP models. Therefore, the repositories may include thousands of activities and related business objects with variation of requirements and quality of service. It is a common practice to customize processes from reference processes or templates in order to reduce the time and effort required to design and deploy processes on all levels. In order to address redundancy and underutilization problems, a generic process model, called as reference BP, is absolutely necessary to cover the best of process variants. This study aims to develop multiple-objective business process genetic algorithm (MOBPGA) to find a set of non-dominated (Pareto) solutions of business reference model to enhance conventional approach which considered only a single objective on creating BP reference model by using proximity score measurement. A mixed-integer linear program is constructed to evaluate performance of the proposed MOBPGA on small-scale problems by using standard measures for multiple-objective techniques. The results will show the viability of applying MOBPGA in terms of simultaneously maximizing proximity score measurement, minimizing total duration, and total costs of the selected reference model.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Navigation and Port Research Conference
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• v.1
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• pp.185-189
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• 2006

Time series analysis is a frequently effective method of constructing model and prediction in data processing of deformation monitoring. The monitoring data sample must to be as more as possible and time intervals are equal roughly so as to construct time series model accurately and achieve reliable prediction. But in the project practice of GPS deformation monitoring, the monitoring data sample can't be obtained too much and time intervals are not equal because of being restricted by all kinds of factors, and it contains many variates in the deformation model moreover. It is very important to study the data processing method for small samples and multi-variates time series in GPS deformation monitoring. A new method of establishing small samples and multi-variates deformation model and prediction model are put forward so as to resolve contradiction of small samples and multi-variates encountered in constructing deformation model and improve formerly data processing method of deformation monitoring. Based on the system theory, a deformation body is regarded as a whole organism; a time-dependence linear system model and a time-dependence bilinear system model are established. The dynamic parameters estimation is derived by means of prediction fit and least information distribution criteria. The final example demonstrates the validity and practice of this method.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Combustion
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.32-41
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• 2013

This study presents both experimental and numerical investigation of ignition delay time of n-heptane and n-butanol binary fuel. The $O_2$ concentration in the mixture was set to 9-10% to make high exhaust gas recirculation( EGR) rate condition which leads low NOx and soot emission. Experiments were performed using a rapid compression machine(RCM) at compressed pressure 20bar, several compressed temperature and three equivalence ratios(0.4, 1.0, 1.5). In addition, a numerical study on the ignition delay time was performed using CHEMKIN codes to validate experimental results and predict chemical species in the combustion process. The results showed that the ignition delay time increased with increasing the n-butanol fraction due to a decrease of oxidation of n-heptane at the low temperature. Moreover, all of the binary fuel mixtures showed the combustion characteristics of n-heptane such as cool flame mode at low temperature and negative-temperature-coefficient(NTC) behavior. Due to the effect of high EGR rate condition, the operating region is reduced at lean condition and the ignition delay time sharply increased compared with no EGR condition.

• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
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• v.22 no.7
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• pp.930-938
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• 2012

High levels of xylanase activity (143.98 IU/ml) produced by the newly isolated Paenibacillus campinasensis G1-1 were detected when it was cultivated in a synthetic medium. A thermostable xylanase, designated XynG1-1, from P. campinasensis G1-1 was purified to homogeneity by Octyl-Sepharose hydrophobic-interaction chromatography, Sephadex G75 gel-filter chromatography, and Q-Sepharose ion-exchange chromatography, consecutively. By multistep purification, the specific activity of XynG1-1 was up to 1,865.5 IU/mg with a 9.1-fold purification. The molecular mass of purified XynG1-1 was about 41.3 kDa as estimated by sodium dodecyl sulfate polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE). Sequence analysis revealed that XynG1-1 containing 377 amino acids encoded by 1,134 bp genomic sequences of P. campinasensis G1-1 shared 96% homology with XylX from Paenibacillus campinasensis BL11 and 77%~78% homology with xylanases from Bacillus sp. YA-335 and Bacillus sp. 41M-1, respectively. The activity of XynG1-1 was stimulated by $Ca^{2+}$, $Ba^{2+}$, DTT, and ${\beta}$-mercaptoethanol, but was inhibited by $Ni^{2+}$, $Fe^{2+}$, $Fe^{3+}$, $Zn^{2+}$, SDS, and EDTA. The purified XynG1-1 displayed a greater affinity for birchwood xylan, with an optimal temperature of $60^{\circ}C$ and an optimal pH of 7.5. The fact that XynG1-1 is cellulose-free, thermostable (stability at high temperature of $70^{\circ}C{\sim}80^{\circ}C$), and active over a wide pH range (pH 5.0~9.0) suggests that the enzyme is potentially valuable for various industrial applications, especially for pulp bleaching pretreatment.

• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
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• v.18 no.5
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• pp.952-957
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• 2008

A Gram-negative bacterium, named LY402, was isolated from contaminated soil. 16S rDNA sequencing and measurement of the physiological and biochemical characteristics identified it as belonging to the genus Enterohacter. Degradation experiments showed that LY402 had the ability to aerobically transform 79 of the 91 major congeners of Aroclor 1242, 1254, and 1260. However, more interestingly, the strain readily degraded certain highly chlorinated and recalcitrant polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). Almost all the tri- and tetra-chlorobiphenyls (CBs), except for 3,4,3',4'-CB, were degraded in 3 days, whereas 73% of 3,4,3',4'-, 92% of the penta-, 76% of the hexa-, and 37% of the hepta-CBs were transformed after 6 days. In addition, among 12 octa-CBs, 2,2',3,3',5,5',6,6-CB was obviously degraded, and 2,2',3,3',4,5,6,6'- and 2,2',3,3',4,5,5',6'-CB were slightly transformed. In a metabolite analysis, mono- and dichlorobenzoic acids (CBAs) were identified, and parts of them were also transformed by strain LY402. Analysis of PCB degradation indicated that strain LY402 could effectively degrade PCB congeners with chlorine substitutions in both ortho- and para-positions. Consequently, this is the first report of an Enterobacteria that can efficiently degrade both low and highly chlorinated PCBs under aerobic conditions.