Jo May 10, 2026
Graphene, which has been studied since 2004, has been widely used in metal-based composites as a very hard reinforcing phase due to its excellent properties. In addition to high strength and high conductivity, graphene reinforced aluminum matrix composites (AMCs) have proved to be lighter, cheaper and better than Cu matrix composites and various aluminum alloys in automotive and aerospace fields.
However, there are still some problems for practical application. Low wettability and dispersibility that have been a challenge for graphene-reinforced metal-matrix composites are also present in aluminum/graphene composites. It means poor interfacial adhesion between graphene and aluminum. Therefore, higher adhesion of the Al/graphene (Al/G) interface is essential to improve the properties of Al-based composites.
Since the surface lattice parameters of copper or nickel are less different from those of graphene than those of aluminum, pre-coating of these metals improves the bonding properties.
Taking it into consideration, Jon Sin Hyok, a researcher at the Faculty of Material Science and Technology, conducted a first-principles study of the interfacial bonding, mechanical strength and electronic properties of copper-doped graphene-Al (Al/Cu/G) composites using several superlattice models with different graphene contents.
The calculation results show that weak chemical bonding due to orbital hybridization between the coated copper and graphene layers is formed, and that the bonding is relatively strong compared to the bonding between Al and graphene layers without Cu, and the bond strength decreases gradually with increasing graphene content.
You can find the details in his paper “First Principle Study on Mechanical and Electronic Properties of Cu Doped Graphene Reinforced Al Composite” in “Proceedings of KUTIC-2025”.
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Jo May 8, 2026
The rotor of a steam turbine is a main element for converting thermal energy into mechanical energy, and its lifetime affects the safety of the whole unit. The units in power plants face several constraints during operation. For instance, the start-up time of a steam turbine is affected by thermal stress. Especially, due to the heavy variation of operation environments, some features of a rotor such as thermal stress, apparent expansion and thermal strain get worse. If they exceed the limitation, the corresponding elements are damaged or even destroyed, causing fatal accidents.
For rapid start-up of a unit, it is necessary to find out its appropriate start-up curve, and it should be operated accordingly to improve the safety and economic efficiency of the plant.
Optimization of turbine start-up in power plants has been studied in many aspects so far. Most of the models were built for real-time simulations. They reflected the features of stage groups of turbine using real-time operation database and various equations for quickness, and in most cases, the efficiency of stage groups were considered to be invariable. In order to determine the thermal stress exerted on the rotor during the start-up and shut-down of a turbine, it is necessary to accurately evaluate the inlet and outlet parameters of the nozzle and blades at each stage, not stage groups. Therefore, detailed calculations for each stage should be conducted to determine the pressure and enthalpy at the nozzle and blades, and their relative internal efficiency.
Rim Ju Yong, a researcher at the Faculty of Thermal Engineering, built a model of a 210MW subcritical condensing steam turbine for a power plant to determine the parameters mentioned above, and composed a special program with VC. Then, according to the operation regulation of turbine, he framed various cold start-up schedules. After that, he calculated the steam parameters on the parts of all stages by using the special program, and studied the temperature field and stress field by the finite element method (FEM).
Taking the calculation results as sample data, he established a regression model to determine the stress at the risk point of rotor. Based on the regression model, he determined the optimal cold start-up schedule using genetic algorithm (GA).
The results show that the fatigue lifetime increases by 20% with the decrease in the maximum von Mises stress by 1.4%, and the start-up period of the optimized schedule is reduced by 124min compared to the original one.
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Jo May 7, 2026
In information security systems, a single authentication mechanism plays a very important role in information processing systems as it provides convenient and secure authentication in multi-Web service environments today when service systems are growing rapidly, and thus there is a lot of research on it around the world. In particular, the access control schemes in single authentication mode have been studied a lot worldwide.
Verifying user’s trust in systems and performing a variety of access controls are very important as a large number of attacks on service systems are attributable to the malicious behavior of registered users.
The characteristics of SSO system make it very difficult to apply the traditional RBAC (Role Based Access Control) model directly because the roles of each service system may be the same but the corresponding rights may be different. Thus, there has been a lot of research on applying RBAC models that can facilitate user management to single authentication systems.
However, the previous dynamic access control schemes based on RBAC model failed to propose a detailed access control scheme according to user’s behavior changes.
Having analyzed the characteristics of the single authentication system and the reliability-based access control scheme, Myong Kwang Min, a section head at the Faculty of Information Science and Technology, has proposed a secure and flexible access control system for SSO system by combining the entropy weighting and the reliability-based access control scheme, and evaluated its performance.
The evaluation results show that the proposed access control model is superior to all single authentication schemes and trust-based access control schemes.
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Jo May 6, 2026
Among the traditional dishes that the Korean people have enjoyed from olden times are pickles, which reflect their taste and likings.
The Korean ancestors had long known that salt can prevent food spoilage and used it in their dietary life to pickle such foods as vegetables, fish and meat so as to store them for a long time.
Such practice of pickling has a very long history. According to historical records, Koreans produced salt from ancient times and ate salted fish a lot.
Kimchi can also be said to have started from pickling at first.
There were parsley kimchi, chives kimchi, radish kimchi, leaf mustard kimchi, etc.
These kinds of kimchi are salted foods created by Koreans in the course of making wide use of pickles in their dietary life for a long time.
Pickling was further developed in the period of the feudal Joson dynasty.
Pickles in those days were divided into salt pickles directly preserved in salt, pickles preserved in bean paste or soy sauce, vinegared pickles and bran pickles using rice bran according to pickling agents. They were also divided into vegetable pickles, meat pickles, fish pickles and herb pickles according to ingredients.
Pickles are very good preserved foods that make it possible to store seasonal foods for a long time under the climatic conditions of the DPRK with distinctive seasons.
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Jo May 5, 2026
Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is an important component for modern digital systems. FPGA is a semi-custom integrated circuit for implementing arbitrary logic functions of users by using look-up tables. FPGA has two main resources. One is logic resource and the other is interconnect resource. The logic resources implement the logic functions of user circuits and the interconnect resources connect logic resources to each other. Logic resource includes look-up table, flip-flop and multiplexer, and a net is an example of interconnect resource. When you write the user circuit into FPGA, FPGA is said to be configured. It is possible to write circuits into FPGA several times, i.e., FPGA has reconfigurability.
FPGA test is a processing for finding out whether there is a fault in FPGA’s resources or not, while FPGA diagnosis is for finding out what fault is in which resource of FPGA. There are two methods for testing and diagnosing FPGAs. One is application-independent method and the other is application-dependent method. The application-independent method can test all resources of FPGA, and the application-dependent method can test only the resources used in the circuit mapped into FPGA.
Factories increase the manufacturing yield of FPGAs by performing application-dependent tests and diagnoses. Application-dependent tests and diagnoses of FPGAs are also important to users because there may be FPGAs that have not passed application-independent tests. In FPGAs, the interconnect resource occupies more chip area than other resources. Therefore, faults in FPGA are mostly interconnect faults.
Two methods have been mainly employed for application-dependent tests and diagnoses of interconnect faults of FPGA. These previous methods are all for testing and diagnosing interconnect of circuits with look-up tables and flip-flops when mapped into FPGA. The circuits mapped into FPGA often include multiplexers in addition to look-up tables and flip-flops. The previous methods are not enough for testing and diagnosing the interconnect of circuits that include multiplexers when mapped into FPGA because the function of multiplexers cannot be changed arbitrarily, unlike look-up tables.
Son Yong Jun, a researcher at the Faculty of Electronics, has proposed a new method for diagnosing interconnect faults of circuits with multiplexers when mapped into FPGA.
This method is an application-dependent method for diagnosing only interconnects of FPGA used in circuits. What is special about this method is to use the hierarchical structure of multiplexers and a single-term function.
The proposed method can be applied to diagnosing any single stuck-at fault and bridging fault in the net of circuits comprised of look-up tables and multiplexers.
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Jo May 4, 2026
Horse riding is a sports event to decide who rides faster on horseback and who performs more spectacular stunts on horseback.
Our country has a very long history of using horses. The Koreans have bred many horses of native kinds suitable for breeding in the mountainous and rugged terrain of the country since long time ago.
The excellent riding skills of the ancestors were inherited and developed at a high level, with such contents as handling weapons and hurdling on horseback being added to them. The best horse riders in the history of the country were the Koguryo people.
The technical contents of horse riding include preparation for horse riding, methods of mounting and dismounting a horse, standard sitting position, learning how to ride at a walking pace, quick pace and gallop and others.
Horsemanship is particularly conspicuous in horse riding.
It is literally performing stunts on horseback, including those of standing on a running horse, turning over from one side to the other by holding the saddle and dragging feet on the ground by clinging to the horse.
As the country has full conditions for horse riding good for health, the enthusiasm for riding is steadily growing stronger among working people, youth and children.
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