Jo Nov 17, 2025
Coal-bed hydraulic fracturing is a key process in coal-bed gas production and one of the important ways for improving its efficiency is to make a new kind of proppant. What is important here is to reduce its density as much as possible, maintaining its technical parameters including strength.
Activated water often used as a fracturing liquid in hydraulic fracturing of coal seam is favourable for forming a complex fracture net, with stable performance and low frictional resistance, but it is limited in hydraulic fracturing due to its low viscosity and low capacity of carrying proppants. The use of ultra-low density proppants for hydraulic fracturing can solve problems such as clogging of cracked pores after gel break of the fracturing liquid and low productivity, often encountered in hydraulic fracturing using dense sand or ceramic granular proppants, and can provide sufficient proppant carrying capacity by crystalloid solutions such as clean and cheap activated water.
In order to solve the problems of high settling rate of proppants when low-cost activated water is used as a hydraulic fracturing liquid, Yun Myong Guk, a researcher at the Faculty of Earth Science and Technology, has prepared a resin-coated ultra-low density proppant with solid slag and white fly ash as feedstock.
He has analyzed the effects of the material composition and the resin dip and coating of the proppant on its performance by X-ray diffraction (XRD), mercury intrusion porosimetry (MIP), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and cylinder pressure methods.
The analysis results are as follows.
The packing effect was best when resin concentration was 25wt.%. When the coating resin content of the proppant dip body was 6%, the visible porosity of particles was reduced to 7.13% and its bulk density was 0.91g/cm3. The apparent density was 1.5g/cm3 and the acid solubility was 0.35%. The breakage rates were 7.3% and 9.0%, respectively under 16MPa and 20MPa closing pressure conditions.
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Jo Nov 16, 2025
Electricity is clean and efficient energy that is essential for human life and widely used. As the power demand increases, the demand for power quality is constantly increasing. The sudden voltage fluctuations in industrial production hinder the normal operation of automation devices and even cause damage to products.
In the evaluation of power quality, system frequency and voltage at the grid nodes are main indices, and the voltage, symmetry and waveform of three-phase network are auxiliary indices.
The dynamic voltage restorer (DVR) is a power electronic device used to protect the load from the shock caused by voltage fluctuations occurring in the electrical network. This device is very effective in improving power quality, compared to conventional compensating devices.
Aiming to compensate harmonics and unbalances, Jong Il Bok, a researcher at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, has proposed a controller for standard voltage calculation of DVR and a current controller using PCI method. Then, he has verified the accuracy of a designed controller in MATLAB/Simulink environment.
The simulation results show that the dynamic voltage restorer can cope with sudden voltage fluctuations and effectively prevent factors affecting power quality such as voltage fluctuations.
And the proposed current controller can be used not only for DVR but also for AC sequences control.
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Jo Nov 14, 2025
Time delay always exists in real processes due to the distribution of a system and the data transport and communication lags, which might lead to worse and even unstable system performance.
Particularly, measurement delay usually degrades the overall system performance, and therefore, this factor should be minimized as much as possible.
With the purpose of improving the performance and effectiveness of a control system taking into account the characteristics of model predictive control (MPC), one of the control methods widely used in practice, Kim Hun Chol, a researcher at the Faculty of Automation Engineering, has proposed a method of eliminating the influence of measurement delay and applied it to the typical nonlinear system, ball & plate system, by combining it with MPC.
He designed an augmented state observer for a nonlinear discrete-time system with measurement delay to estimate delay-perturbed term, and implemented the state feedback to eliminate it. Then, he combined it with MPC to verify the effectiveness of the entire control system via simulations by MATLAB and real experiments by applying it to the ball & plate system.
In addition, he applied MPC to the control of machines and found out that the control was smooth and there was no strong oscillation that affects servomotors.
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Jo Nov 13, 2025
Sorting of data elements is a technical problem arising in many fields including statistics. Sorting is the process of rearranging disordered data elements according to the values.
The most important problem in sorting is to decrease the complexity of sorting. Previous papers described several methods to improve selective sorting, one of which is to select and store small data elements during a single scan to shorten the sorting time using a queue.
In order to further update the time of selective sorting, Jong Yong Bok, a researcher at the Faculty of Information Science and technology, has proposed a method of shortening the run time for sorting by half over the existing methods by selecting and storing both the minimum and maximum elements at the same time during one pass using a queue and a stack.
The proposed method proves to be effective for sorting data elements in the fields where they appear iteratively with fortuity including statistics of population according to age and grade management.
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Jo Nov 12, 2025
Brittle material cutting by laser, which is performed below the glass transition temperature, exerts no external force on blanks and leaves no need for grinding as it ensures smooth edges and clean cutting.
The controlled cutting technique generates tensile stress along the cutting path and maintains the temperature below the glass transition temperature. With this technique, it is difficult to control fissure propagation inside the glass because of its cutting characteristics and stress distribution. What is important for it is to generate precise temperature and thermal stress fields and to decrease the cut deviation at the leading and trailing edges of glass.
Kim Yong Il, a researcher at the Institute of Nano Science and Technology, has built a finite element model for temperature and stress fields of glass, established boundary conditions, and studied the effect of laser cutting speed on minimizing the cutting path deviations at the leading and trailing edges while decreasing the thermal stresses.
Through the simulation, he has proved that the cutting deviations at the trailing and leading edges seem to be decreased remarkably at the optimized power and cutting speed during continuous laser cutting. In addition, he has predicted that continuous laser is not suitable for soda-lime glass of 5mm in thickness above 900W of mean power and 22.5mm/s of scanning speed.
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Jo Nov 11, 2025
It is very important to correct the synchronization errors that occur if the receiver is not completely synchronized with the transmitter. However, it is impossible to achieve perfect synchronization in many communication systems.
Synchronization errors due to the insertion and deletion of symbols can cause serious performance degradation if the coding scheme does not possess the capability to recover from such errors.
Pak Jang Son, a researcher at the Faculty of Communications, has proposed a method for correcting synchronization errors that occur in Turbo code sequence using the algebraic operation principle of Scarce-State-Transition (SST) Viterbi decoder.
The encoding/decoding procedures of Turbo code in this method are similar to the common case, except making corrupted bit positions caused by bit insertion/deletion in received Turbo code sequence take their original positions.
The simulation result shows that the proposed method is capable of correcting synchronization errors occurring in the received Turbo code sequences.
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