Jo Dec 8, 2024
Seven-storey Tower at Hyonhwa Temple was originally standing on the site of a temple called Hyonhwa Temple at the foot of Mt. Ryongchu in Wolgo-ri, Jangphung County, Kaesong City, but at present it is in Koryo Museum.
According to the historical records, the tower was built in 1020.
It consists of a platform, the body of seven stories and a head.
It is 8.64 meters high and each side of the platform is 3.9 meters long. It is rather tall as a stone tower of the Koryo age.
On each side of the platform are three pillars between which properly faced brick-shaped stones are neatly piled in five layers. Thick plate stones are placed on the top of the platform. Such formation of the platform is rare for stone towers.
What is so unusual about the tower is curved eaves and corner columns.
On the seven body stones are engraved with Buddhist images, which shows excellent and sophisticated engraving.
The tower is large in scale and made in considerable dimensions with exquisite workmanship of parts and a good harmony of the whole and the parts.
The tower is a precious national treasure showing the tower architecture of Korean ancestors and its development.
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Jo Dec 5, 2024
In recent years, rapid economic development in many countries has resulted in an increase in energy consumption, and hence, a tremendous amount of industrial waste heat is emitted into the atmosphere. The recycling of the waste heat is of great significance in improving the thermal efficiency of systems.
Open cycle absorption heat pump is of great significance in improving the energy efficiency of the system by the latent heat recovery of the exhaust gas. The heat and mass transfer processes between solution and moist air are very complex and many studies have been carried out on them.
The results show that the open cycle AHP is very effective for the latent heat recovery of exhaust gas. As this process depends on the direct contact heat and mass transfer between exhaust gas and solution in the absorber, this process was mostly simulated by numerical analysis by discretizing the heat balance equations for moist air and solution along the flow direction. This method is applicable to the case of uniform distribution of air flow in the absorber. In reality, the velocity is different at each position of the absorber. In this case, the flow distribution inside the absorber should be taken into account together.
Ri Kwang Chol, a researcher at the Faculty of Heat Engineering, has built a mathematical model to describe the heat and mass transfer in the absorber of an open cycle absorption heat pump in consideration of the flow characteristics of air inside, and analyzed it by Ansys Fluent.
The results show that the absorption performance is affected by several parameters among which the solution flux has the greatest effect, and that the temperature and moisture content of outlet air depend on the inlet air velocity whose optimum value in the absorber is 1.5m/s.
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Jo Dec 3, 2024
The Wooden Bridge of the Taedong River was built in the period of Koguryo to link Chongho-dong in Taesong District with Hyuam-dong in Sadong District, Pyongyang City.
Around the bridge are several historical sites of the Koguryo age. To the north are Taesongsan Fort and Anhak Palace, and to the northwest and northeast are Chongam-ri Castle and Kobangsan Fort. To the south on the other side are the Mausoleum of King Tongmyong, the founder of Koguryo, and Jongrung Temple, the temple of the mausoleum. The location of these historical sites implies that the bridge was a major traffic route connecting the royal palace of Koguryo and the southern area to the Taedong River.
At the east entrance to the bridge is a log frame interlocked for a light pole. The frames of the bridge are mostly thick timber girders 38 centimeters wide, 26 centimeters thick and 8 to 10 centimeters long.
The traces of the bridge show that it was a large bridge about 375 meters long and about 9 meters wide, with a thick floor covering and railings on tightly-fit supporting planks on massive supporting pillars of interlocked log frames.
At the time of discovery, not only wooden frameworks but also many pieces of roofing tiles and earthenware of the Koguryo age were unearthed in the vicinity of the bridge, which indicates the long history of the bridge.
The bridge was one of the oldest and largest bridges of great rarity in the world as well as in our country at that time.
The size of the bridge and its structural elements, and the skills in strong fabrication by the dovetail joint demonstrate the high level of wooden construction techniques of the Koguryo people.
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Jo Nov 24, 2024
Chloride sensors have found wide application in the fields of environment monitoring, tideland agriculture, soil science and water supply systems since chloride is widely distributed in the form of compound in nature. Although high chloride concentrations in environmental samples do not cause harm to the human body, they can cause severe corrosion in metallic pipes, leading to the destruction of water systems and to the increase in the concentration level of metal ions in drinking water. Therefore, the maximum allowable Cl− level of 250mg·L−1 has been established by the World Health Organization (WHO) for drinking water and natural water.
Usually, chloride ions in solution can be measured by gravimetry, titrimetry, spectrophotometry, potentiometry, coulometry and ion chromatography. Among them, the major applications in the industrial field are spectrophotometry, potentiometry (ISE), and coulometry.
For this purpose, optical, fluorescent, and electrochemical sensors have been developed. Optical sensors enable measurement regardless of the pH or temperature of the solution, and fluorescent sensors have the advantages of good selectivity and high sensitivity to Cl- and short response time. However, these sensors are relatively expensive and have shortcomings of short lifetime due to photolysis or bleaching of the sensing materials.
In many cases, electrochemical sensors use potentiometry based on the half-cell potential of a silver/silver chloride (Ag/AgCl) electrode measured compared to a reference electrode at equilibrium. The potentiometric determination of chloride by Ag/AgCl electrode has been widely used in harsh applications due to its low cost, simple fabrication and long-term stability.
Kim Kyong Il, a researcher at the Faculty of Electronics, has proposed a new and simple fabrication method of a highly sensitive Ag/AgCl chloride sensor for real-time measurement of water quality. He fabricated the working electrode by electrodeposition and melt deposition of AgCl + Ag2S on the surface of Ag wire and coating the PVC film on it.
The study showed a good linear relationship between the logarithm of chloride ion concentration and the electrode potential when the chloride ion concentration in tap water, seawater and agricultural irrigation water ranged from 5×10-4 to 1mol·L-1. The potential response was affected by pH, but the ions commonly present in environmental samples such as K+, Ca2+, Na+, NO3-, SO4- were not affected.
For more details, please refer to his paper “A Simple Fabrication Method of Chloride Sensor Based on Hot-Dipped Ag/AgCl@PVC for Water Quality Monitoring” in “Water Air Soil Pollut” (SCI).
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Jo Nov 24, 2024
Grounding plays a very important role in ensuring safe and reliable operation of power systems and protecting people and electrical equipment. The continuous increase in the voltage level and scale of power systems has resulted in the increasing strictness of the technical requirement for grounding devices. Grounding resistance is an important index to evaluate the effectiveness and safety of the grounding system.
The grounding resistance is usually rated at 10Ω for thunderbolt protection, and 1Ω or less than that at large scale substations.
The factors influencing the grounding resistance of the vertical electrode are the radius and length of the electrode, the soil resistivity and the embedding depth. It is essential for the design of the vertical grounding electrode to get a mathematical model of the grounding resistance that comprehensively reflects the influences of the factors on the grounding resistance of the vertical grounding electrode.
Many authors have published their research results for the mathematical modeling on the grounding resistance of vertical grounding electrodes, but they considered only the length and diameter of the vertical grounding electrode and the soil resistivity.
The length and diameter of the vertical electrode as well as the embedding depth affect the grounding resistance.
Kwon Hye Yong, a section head at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, has obtained a mathematical model for the grounding resistance of a vertical electrode that accurately reflects the influence of embedding depth in a homogeneous soil, and verified its accuracy through computer simulation analysis and field measurements at different soil resistivity conditions.
The computational results by the proposed model agree with the results of computer simulation analysis and field measurements.
For more information, please refer to her paper “A Method for Grounding Resistance Calculation of the Vertical grounding electrode” in “Electric Power Systems Research” (SCI).
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Jo Nov 23, 2024
Currently, redox flow batteries are the most promising candidates for renewable energy storage in the field of MW-scaled electrical energy storage technologies, among which vanadium redox flow batteries (VRFBs) have advantages of wide application range, low maintenance cost, strong load balancing capability, long cycle life, etc.
In VRFBs, electrolyte is one of the important components, which has a significant impact on device performance and cost.
During the continuous electrolyte preparation, the vanadyl sulfate (V(IV)) solution from the mixing reactor is continuously in contact with the cathode of several cascaded cells, and the V(IV) solution is partially reduced to the V(III) solution in the first cell, and then completely converted to V(III) in the final cell. During electrochemical reduction, a solution of V(IV)/V(III) ratio 1:1, i.e., a neutral solution and a solution V(III) from the final cell, is used for VRFBs. Therefore, the real-time analysis of each vanadium species in the electrolyte preparation process is essential and of great significance.
Potentiometric titration is commonly used to directly determine vanadium electrolyte concentration. This method is not suitable for online monitoring because it is time-consuming and requires experiments. Recently, digital image-based methods have been selected for quantitative analysis in analytical chemistry. Moreover, the use of digital image analysis has attracted considerable attention in studying electrochemical processes with color changes. Digital image acquisition is a non-contact, non-invasive, cost-effective technique and it can overcome certain problems in classical spectroscopic analysis such as reduced and scattered spectral signals. These analytical methods have advantages such as low cost, high analytical accuracy and short analysis time.
Jon Sang Mo, a researcher at the Faculty of Chemical Engineering, has proposed a digital image-based analytical method to determine the concentration of vanadium species (V(IV)/V(III)) in the process of vanadium electrolyte preparation. Since this method is simple in procedure and less time-consuming compared to other analytical methods, it could be applied to real-time analysis in the process of electrolyte preparation.
You can find the details in his paper “Analysis of vanadium species(V(IV)/V(III) in the electrolyte manufacturing process for vanadium redox flow battery using digital image” in “Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry” (SCI).
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