• Economic and Environmental Geology
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• v.38 no.3 s.172
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• pp.305-317
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• 2005

This study addresses the preliminary results of rock slope stability analyses including hazard assessments for slope failure conducted on the selected sections of rural road cut slope which are about 4 km long. The study area is located in the Mt. Chuntae northeast of Busan and mainly composed of Cretaceous rhyolitic ash-flow tuff', fallout tuff, rhyolitc and andesite. The volcanic rock mass in the area has a number of discontinuities that produce a potentially unstable slope, as the present cut slope is more than 70 degrees in most of the slope sections. Discontinuity geometry data were collected at selected 8 scanline sections and analyzed to estimate important discontinuity geometry parameters to perform rock slope kinematic and block theory analyses. Kinematic analysis for plane sliding has resulted in maximum safe slope angles greater than $65^{\circ}$ for most of the discontinuities. For most of the wedges, maximum safe cut slope angles greater than $45^{\circ}$ were obtained. Maximum safe slope angles greater than 80" were obtained fur most of the discontinuities in the toppling case. The block theory analysis resulted in the identification of potential key blocks (type II) in the SL4, SL5, SL6 and SL8 sections. The chance of sliding taking place through a type ll block under a combined gravitational and external loading is quite high in the investigated area. The results support in-field observations of a potentially unstable slope that could become hazardous under external forces. The results obtained through limit equilibrium slope stability analyses show how a stable slope can become an unstable slope as the water pressure acting on joints increases and how a stable slope under Barton's shear strength criterion can fail as the worst case scenario of using Mohr-Coulomb criterion.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.25 no.5
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• pp.391-401
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• 2004

3D imaging systems using 2D phased arrays have a large number of active channels, compelling to use a very expensive and bulky beamforming hardware, and suffer from low volume rate because, in principle, at least one ultrasound transmit-receive event is necessary to construct each scanline. A high speed 3D imaging method using a cross array proposed previously to solve the above limitations can implement fast scanning and dynamic focusing in the lateral direction but suffer from low resolution except at the fixed transmit focusing along the elevational direction. To overcome these limitations, we propose a new real-time volumetric imaging method using a cross array based on the synthetic aperture technique. In the proposed method, ultrasound wave is transmitted successively using each elements of an 1D transmit array transducer, one at a time, which is placed along the elevational direction and for each firing, the returning pulse echoes are received using all elements of an 1D receive array transducer placed along the lateral direction. On receive, by employing the conventional dynamic focusing and synthetic aperture method along lateral and elevational directions, respectively, ultrasound waves can be focused effectively at all imaging points. In addition, in the proposed method, a volume of interest consisting of any required number of slice images, can be constructed with the same number of transmit-receive steps as the total number of transmit array elements. Computer simulation results show that the proposed method can provide the same and greatly improved resolutions in the lateral and elevational directions, respectively, compared with the 3D imaging method using a cross array based on the conventional fixed focusing. In the accompanying paper, we will also propose a new real-time 3D imaging method using a cross array for improving transmit power and elevational spatial resolution, which uses linear wave fronts on transmit.