8,849 research outputs found
Circular economy business models and consumer acceptance in the electrical and electronic equipment sector: a comparative study of Singapore and South Korea
ChangHee Kim investigated consumer acceptance of Product-Service Systems for refrigerators and washing machines in Singapore and South Korea. His results revealed that both countries shared similar value requirements but showed slight differences in value-in-experience and value-in-use. Household appliance producers are leveraging his results to shift towards a circular economy society
Parity-violating coupling constant from the flavor-conserving effective weak chiral Lagrangian
We investigate the parity-violating pion-nucleon-nucleon coupling constant
, based on the chiral quark-soliton model. We employ an effective
weak Hamiltonian that takes into account the next-to-leading order corrections
from QCD to the weak interactions at the quark level. Using the gradient
expansion, we derive the leading-order effective weak chiral Lagrangian with
the low-energy constants determined. The effective weak chiral Lagrangian is
incorporated in the chiral quark-soliton model to calculate the
parity-violating constant . We obtain a value of about
at the leading order. The corrections from the next-to-leading order
reduce the leading order result by about 20~\%.Comment: 12 page
Numerical Sensitivity Tests of Volatile Organic Compounds Emission to PM2.5 Formation during Heat Wave Period in 2018 in Two Southeast Korean Cities
A record-breaking severe heat wave was recorded in southeast Korea from 11 July to 15 August 2018, and the numerical sensitivity simulations of volatile organic compound (VOC) to secondarily generated particulate matter with diameter of less than 2.5 mu m (PM2.5) concentrations were studied in the Busan and Ulsan metropolitan areas in southeast Korea. A weather research and forecasting (WRF) model coupled with chemistry (WRF-Chem) was employed, and we carried out VOC emission sensitivity simulations to investigate variations in PM2.5 concentrations during the heat wave period that occurred from 11 July to 15 August 2018. In our study, when anthropogenic VOC emissions from the Comprehensive Regional Emissions Inventory for Atmospheric Transport Experiment-2015 (CREATE-2015) inventory were increased by approximately a factor of five in southeast Korea, a better agreement with observations of PM2.5 mass concentrations was simulated, implying an underestimation of anthropogenic VOC emissions over southeast Korea. The simulated secondary organic aerosol (SOA) fraction, in particular, showed greater dominance during high temperature periods such as 19-21 July, 2018, with the SOA fractions of 42.3% (in Busan) and 34.3% (in Ulsan) among a sub-total of seven inorganic and organic components. This is considerably higher than observed annual mean organic carbon (OC) fraction (28.4 +/- 4%) among seven components, indicating the enhancement of secondary organic aerosols induced by photochemical reactions during the heat wave period in both metropolitan areas. The PM2.5 to PM10 ratios were 0.69 and 0.74, on average, during the study period in the two cities. These were also significantly higher than the typical range in those cities, which was 0.5-0.6 in 2018. Our simulations implied that extremely high temperatures with no precipitation are significantly important to the secondary generation of PM2.5 with higher secondary organic aerosol fraction via photochemical reactions in southeastern Korean cities. Other possible relationships between anthropogenic VOC emissions and temperature during the heat wave episode are also discussed in this study
Taurine reduces ER stress in C. elegans
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>ER stress is a strong indicator of whether or not a cell is undergoing physiological stress. C. elegans is a practical system of characterizing the effect of ER stress at the <it>in vivo</it> or organismal level.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>This study characterized taurine’s anti-ER stress potential employing western blotting on ER stress markers and assays of motility, lifespan comparison, and fecundity measurement.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>When treated with tunicamycin, C. elegans showed the typical ER stress symptoms. It showed a higher expression of hsp-70 and skn-1 than the non-treated control. Survivorship significantly decreased under tunicamycin treatment, and the offspring number also decreased. During the synchronized culture under ER stress conditions, the C. elegans showed early signs of aging especially between L3 and L4 within their life span, along with lowered motility. The worms, however, showed a positive response to the taurine treatment under ER stress conditions.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>When C. elegans were treated with taurine before or after the tunicamycin treatment, they showed a less severe level of ER stress, including an enhanced survivorship, increased motility, and augmented fecundity. Taken together, these results strongly indicate that taurine works positively to cope with ER stress from the organismal perspective.</p
Gravitational waves from BH-NS binaries: Effective Fisher matrices and parameter estimation using higher harmonics
Inspiralling black hole-neutron star (BH-NS) binaries emit a complicated
gravitational wave signature, produced by multiple harmonics sourced by their
strong local gravitational field and further modulated by the orbital plane's
precession. Some features of this complex signal are easily accessible to
ground-based interferometers (e.g., the rate of change of frequency); others
less so (e.g., the polarization content); and others unavailable (e.g.,
features of the signal out of band). For this reason, an ambiguity function (a
diagnostic of dissimilarity) between two such signals varies on many parameter
scales and ranges. In this paper, we present a method for computing an
approximate, effective Fisher matrix from variations in the ambiguity function
on physically pertinent scales which depend on the relevant signal to noise
ratio. As a concrete example, we explore how higher harmonics improve parameter
measurement accuracy. As previous studies suggest, for our fiducial BH-NS
binaries and for plausible signal amplitudes, we see that higher harmonics at
best marginally improve our ability to measure parameters. For non-precessing
binaries, these Fisher matrices separate into intrinsic (mass, spin) and
extrinsic (geometrical) parameters; higher harmonics principally improve our
knowledge about the line of sight. For the precessing binaries, the extra
information provided by higher harmonics is distributed across several
parameters. We provide concrete estimates for measurement accuracy, using
coordinates adapted to the precession cone in the detector's sensitive band.Comment: 19 pages, 11 figure
Identification of parameter matrices using estimated FRF variation
This study presents an analytical method to predict the dynamic parameters of actual structure from measured FRF (Frequency Response Function) data. The inconsistency due to modeling errors between the actual structure and the finite element model exists. The number of measured data is less than the one of a full set of dofs and should be expanded to estimate the parameters. Considering that the stiffness and mass matrices are related with the real part of the expanded FRF data and the damping matrix with the imaginary part, the variation in the parameter matrices is evaluated. A numerical example evaluates the appropriateness of the proposed method
Damage detection based on the internal force or deformation variation
The presence of damage in an intact structure leads to the change in internal force and deformation due to stiffness deterioration in the region of damage. This study proposes modelbased damage detection methods by deriving the mathematical formulation to describe such changes. The force and deformation variations between the undamaged and damaged systems are derived by minimizing the variation in dynamic strain energy with respect to the internal force and deformation vectors, respectively. They are expressed by the product of a coefficient matrix and the external force vector, and the product of a coefficient matrix and the displacement vector, respectively. Taking singular value decomposition (SVD) on the coefficient matrices of rank-deficiency, this study identifies the damaged elements as belonging to the set of elements whose internal forces or deformations between two adjacent nodes of finite element model are not changed. The validity of the proposed methods is illustrated in a simple application
Proto-Model of an Infrared Wide-Field Off-Axis Telescope
We develop a proto-model of an off-axis reflective telescope for infrared
wide-field observations based on the design of Schwarzschild-Chang type
telescope. With only two mirrors, this design achieves an entrance pupil
diameter of 50 mm and an effective focal length of 100 mm. We can apply this
design to a mid-infrared telescope with a field of view of 8 deg X 8 deg. In
spite of the substantial advantages of off-axis telescopes in the infrared
compared to refractive or on-axis reflective telescopes, it is known to be
difficult to align the mirrors in off-axis systems because of their asymmetric
structures. Off-axis mirrors of our telescope are manufactured at the Korea
Basic Science Institute (KBSI). We analyze the fabricated mirror surfaces by
fitting polynomial functions to the measured data. We accomplish alignment of
this two-mirror off-axis system using a ray tracing method. A simple imaging
test is performed to compare a pinhole image with a simulated prediction.Comment: 14 pages, 16 figure
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