Evaluation of the Pullout Behavior of Pre-Bored Piles Embedded in Rock.

The subject of this study is dry process caisson tube method cofferdam (hereinafter called C.T cofferdam). This C.T cofferdam is designed to use the skin friction of the drilled shaft embedded into the rock for stability of buoyancy. A pre-bored pile embedded in the bedrock was pulled out due to the buoyancy of the C.T cofferdam at the pier (hereinafter called P) 2 of the OO bridges under construction, to which this was applied. In this study, in order to solve this problem, the adhesion force applied with the concept of skin friction and the pre-bored pile of drilled shaft according to domestic and foreign design standards were identified; the on-site pull-out load test was used to calculate the pull-out force; and the skin friction of the drilled shaft and pre-bored pile embedded into the bedrock were compared and analyzed. In addition, the pull-out behavior of the pre-bored pile embedded in the bedrock was analyzed through numerical analysis. The adhesion strength tested in the lab was 881 kN for air curing of concrete and 542 kN for water curing of concrete, and the on-site pull-out test result was 399.7 kN. As a result of the numerical analysis, the material properties of the grout considering the site conditions used revealed that the displacement of the entire structure exceeded the allowable limit and was unstable. This appears to have lowered the adhesion strength due to construction issues such as ground complexity and both seawater and slime treatment, which were not expected at the time of design.

A New Dynamic Complex Baseband Pulse Compression Method for Chirp-Coded Excitation in Medical Ultrasound Imaging.

Chirp-coded excitation can increase the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) without degrading the axial resolution. Effective pulse compression (PC) is important to maintain the axial resolution and can be achieved with radio frequency (RF) and complex baseband (CBB) data (i.e., and , respectively). can further reduce the computational complexity compared to ; however, suffers from a degraded SNR due to tissue attenuation. In this paper, we propose a new dynamic CBB PC method ( that can improve the SNR while compensating for tissue attenuation. The compression filter coefficients in the method are generated by dynamically changing the demodulation frequencies along with the depth. For PC, the obtained coefficients are independently applied to the in-phase and quadrature components of the CBB data. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, simulation, phantom, and in vivo studies were conducted, and all three studies showed improved SNR, i.e., maximally 3.87, 7.41, and 5.75 dB, respectively. In addition, the measured peak range sidelobe level of the proposed method yielded lower values than the and , and it also derived a suitable target location, i.e., a <0.07-mm target location error, while maintaining the axial resolution. In an in vivo abdominal experiment, the method depicted brighter and clearer features in the hyperechoic region because highly correlated signals were produced by compensating for tissue attenuation. These results demonstrated that the proposed method can improve the SNR of chirp-coded excitation while preserving the axial resolution and the target location and reducing the computational complexity.

An efficient pulse compression method of chirp-coded excitation in medical ultrasound imaging.

Coded excitation can improve the SNR in medical ultrasound imaging. In coded excitation, pulse compression is applied to compress the elongated coded signals into a short pulse, which typically requires high computational complexity, i.e., a compression filter with a few hundred coefficients. In this paper, we propose an efficient pulse compression method of chirp-coded excitation, in which the pulse compression is conducted with complex baseband data after downsampling, to lower the computational complexity. In the proposed method, although compression is conducted with the complex data, the L-fold downsampling is applied for reducing both data rates and the number of compression filter coefficients; thus, total computational complexity is reduced to the order of 1/L(2). The proposed method was evaluated with simulation and phantom experiments. From the simulation and experiment results, the proposed pulse compression method produced similar axial resolution compared with the conventional pulse compression method with negligible errors, i.e., ≫36 dB in signal-to-error ratio (SER). These results indicate that the proposed method can maintain the performance of pulse compression of chirp-coded excitation while substantially reducing computational complexity.