• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.53 no.6
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• pp.1846-1857
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• 2021

Ultrasonic nondestructive testing is important for monitoring the structural integrity of dissimilar metal welds (DMWs) in pressure vessels and piping in nuclear power plants. However, there is a low probability of crack detection via inspection of DMWs using ultrasonic waves because the grain structures (grain orientations) of the weld area cause distortion and splitting of ultrasonic beams propagating in anisotropic media. To overcome this issue, the grain orientation should be known, and a precise ultrasonic wave simulation technique in anisotropic media is required to model the distortion and splitting of the waves accurately. In this study, a method for nondestructive prediction of the DMW grain orientations is presented for accurate simulation of ultrasonic wave propagation behavior in the weld area. The ultrasonic wave propagation behavior in anisotropic media is simulated via finite-element analysis when ultrasonic waves propagate in a transversely isotropic material. In addition, a methodology to predict the DMW grain orientation is proposed that employs a simulation technique for ultrasonic wave propagation behavior calculation and an optimization technique. The simulated ultrasonic wave behaviors with the grain orientations predicted via the proposed method demonstrate its usefulness. Moreover, the method can be used to determine the focal law in DMWs.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Manufacturing Process Engineers
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.69-75
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• 2019

Since gasoline engines are based on a combination of a cast iron liner and an aluminum block, which have different thermal properties and stiffnesses, bore shape distortion is likely to occur during honing due to uneven thermal deformation. To solve this problem, many tests and evaluations are needed to support the development of a high-performance honing stone with low heat generation. Moreover, performance evaluation, which depends on inspection and observation after work, often requires much trial and error to optimize tool design, due to challenges in the accurate interpretation of results. This study confirmed that the assessment of grinding capability was clarified by evaluating performance under severe work conditions and by in-situ measurement and recording of current consumption (workload) and heat generation during operation. As a result of using a honing stone with excellent grinding performance in engine block manufacture-in which cylinder bore distortion caused by thermal deformation during manufacture is a problem-a noticeable improvement in the degree of cylindricity was observed.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.231-238
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• 2007

Ultrasonic inspection of austenitic steel weldments is a truly difficult task due to complicated wave propagation phenomena such as beam skewing, splitting and distortion. In order to understand these phenomena and design proper inspection procedures, simulation is increasingly paid more attention to. This article addresses a ray tracing based approach to determine incident angle and position of optimal wave mode ultrasonic beam for flaw detection in anisotropic and inhomogeneous austenitic steel weldments. Specially, the optimal mode of ultrasonic wave wave is selected by ray tracing simulation, and an optimization approach based on ray tracing and bi-section search is proposed in order to find the ray path connecting two given points in weldments. With help of this approach, the optimal incident angle and position of ultrasonic beam can be determined for a given flaw position.

• Journal of international Conference on Electrical Machines and Systems
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.79-84
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• 2012

In this paper, a three-phase high-voltage converter (HVC), in which the main structure of each phase is composed of a cascaded PWM rectifier (CPR) and cascaded inverter (CI), is studied. A high-voltage grid is the input of the HVC. In order to ensure proper operation of the HVC, the control method should achieve output voltage sharing (OVS) among the rectifiers in the CPR, OVS among the inverters in the CI, and high power factor. Master-slave direct-current control (MDCC) is used to control the CPR. The ability of the control system to prevent interference is strong when using MDCC. The CI is controlled by three-loop control, which is composed of an outer common-output-voltage loop, inner current loops and voltage sharing loops. Simulation results show low total harmonic distortion (THD) in the HVC input currents and good OVS in both the CPR and CI.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.28 no.3
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• pp.323-329
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• 2011

Certified reference materials (CRMs) have been used to calibrate surface profilers for reliable measurements. In this paper, we present a newly designed step height CRM which has a step height pattern with two different widths and various special patterns for checking radial magnification, distortion of optical viewing systems, etc. Especially, it could be useful for multi-probe inspection instruments in the manufacturing lines. The fabrication was done by conventional optical lithography and dry etching process with optimized conditions. To verify the step height values, a white-light scanning interferometer was used with objective lenses having magnification of $10{\times}$ and $100{\times}$. CRMs with nominal step heights of $0.5\;{\mu}m$, $1\;{\mu}m$, $3\;{\mu}m$, $5\;{\mu}m$, $7\;{\mu}m$, and $10\;{\mu}m$ were fabricated and the uniformity of these CRMs was evaluated to be less than 3 nm ($1{\sigma}$).

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.3 no.4
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• pp.199-204
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• 1999

The continuing development of the sensors for the measurement of the safety of structures has been making a turning point in measuring and evaluating the larger civil structural system as well. However, there are still remaining problems to be solved for the extremely large structure because the natural damages of those structures are not so simple to be monitored for the reason of their locational and structural conditions. One of the most significant problems is that a number of cables which connect the measuring system to the analyzer are liable to distort actual data. This paper presents a new monitoring system for large structures by means of a local wireless communication technique which would eliminate the possibility of the distortion of data by noise in cables. This new monitoring system employs the wireless system and the software for data communication, along with the strain sensor and accelerometers which have been already used in the past. It makes it possible for the data, which have been chosen by the central controling system from the various sensors placed in the large civil structures, to be wirelessly delivered and then analyzed and evaluated by decision making system of the structures.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.719-741
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• 2014

Monitoring surface cracks is important to ensure the health of concrete structures. However, traditional visual inspection to monitor the concrete cracks has disadvantages such as subjective inspection nature, associated time and cost, and possible danger to inspectors. To alter the visual inspection, a complete procedure for automated crack assessment based on adaptive digital image processing has been proposed in this study. Crack objects are extracted from the images using the subtraction with median filter and the local binarization using the Niblack's method. To adaptively. determine the optimal window sizes for the median filter and the Niblack's method without distortion of crack object an optimal filter size index (OFSI) is proposed. From the extracted crack objects using the optimal size of window, the crack objects are decomposed to the crack skeletons and edges, and the crack width is calculated using 4-connected normal line according to the orientation of the local skeleton line. For an image, a crack width nephogram is obtained to have an intuitive view of the crack distribution. The proposed procedure is verified from a test on a concrete reaction wall with various types of cracks. From the crack images with different crack widths and patterns, the widths of cracks in the order of submillimeters are calculated with high accuracy.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.60 no.5
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• pp.1023-1029
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• 2011

In the industrial vision systems, image correction has great influence on the overall performance of measurement or inspection. The overall area of distorted image is usually splitted into small control areas, and each area is corrected by its control points. The performance of correction methods using control points can be improved by reduction of control areas because the computational time and memory highly depend on the number of control areas. We develop a merging algorithm that reduces control areas and preserves the correction accuracy. The algorithm merges the splitted control areas by use of quad tree method. Experimental results are presented to verify the usefulness of the proposed method.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.56 no.5
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• pp.876-883
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• 2007

The magnetic flux leakage(MFL) type nondestructive testing(NDT) method is widely used to detect corrosion, defects and mechanical deformation of the underground gas pipelines. The object pipeline is magnetically saturated by the magnetic system with permanent magnet and yokes. Hall sensors detect the leakage fields in the region of the defect. The defects are sometimes occurred in group. The accuracy of the detecting signals in this defect cluster become lowered because of the complexity of the defect cluster. In this paper, the effects of the multi -defects are analyzed. The detecting signals are computed by 3-dimensional finite element method and compared with real measurement. The results say that, rather than the size of the defects, the effects of the relative position of the multi-defects are very important on the detecting signals.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.224-229
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• 2007

This paper presents a camera calibration method using several images for three dimensional measurement applications such as stereo systems, mobile robots, and visual inspection systems in factories. Conventional calibration methods that use single image suffer from errors related to reference point extraction in image, lens distortion, and numerical analysis of nonlinear optimization. The camera parameter values obtained from images of same camera is not same even though we use same calibration method. The camera parameters that are obtained from several images of different view for a calibration target is usaully not same with large error values and we can not assume a special probabilistic distribution when we estimate the parameter values. In this paper, the median value of camera parameters from several images is used to improve estimation of the camera values in an iterative step with nonlinear optimization. The proposed method is proved by experiments using real images.