The envelope (façade) of a building is the part that forms the primary barrier to its environment. Most of the new and modern office buildings have a glazed envelope and are usually built-in city centers. The concept of a double-skin façade was born as a consequence of urban noise. The principal noise source in urban areas is traffic noise. Using a double-skin façade can be a solution that ensures good sound insulation for a glazed office building. This study presents experimental results obtained both from measurement campaigns carried out over longer periods of time, in connection with heat transfer in the case of this system, and punctual measurements, over shorter periods of time, for sound insulation and interior comfort parameters, from the experimental chamber adjacent to the system. The results from this study indicate that box double-skin façades can contribute to noise reduction, improve the interior thermal comfort and increase the energetic performance compared to normal single-glass façades, but within certain limits.
Due to the intensive process of road construction or rehabilitation of pavement caused by an increase in traffic volume, in the field of rigid pavement design and research in Romania, we can say that there is a need to improve the design method. In the last decade, more and more researchers have been concerned about climate change and the increase in traffic volume; hence, there is a need for a renewal of the climatological, as well as traffic, databases because these are part of the input data for the design process. The design method currently used in Romania for jointed plain concrete pavement design is NP081/2002. The limitation of the data and the lack of lifetime estimation of structural and functional performance are the main aspects that need to be addressed in the new design procedure. The Mechanistic–Empirical Pavement Design (MEPDG) method offers the possibility of the design of pavement structures by estimating the structural and functional performances. This paper aims to obtain a comparative study of these two methods for the analysis of the input data collected from the field corresponding to the three failure criteria, while the symmetry of the characteristics of the material and their asymmetrical thicknesses are compared, thus contributing to the design of viable and long-lasting pavement structures using a rigid pavement with the specific characteristics of the mountainous area in northeastern Romania on the national road DN17 Suceava—Vatra Dornei. The novelty of this study consists of the implementation of the mechanistic–empirical method MEPDG instead of the old NP081/2002 method used in Romania.
The COVID-19 pandemic, in addition to the sometimes-dramatic effects in the health sector, presented a wide range of challenges for the various sectors of the national economies. This article refers to the effects of the pandemic in the university field, especially for the period of 2021 until now. The period corresponds to the end of the pandemic overlapping with the post-pandemic return to normal. Although at the beginning of the pandemic the effects seemed terrible, being widespread and long-lasting, some effects were still useful and motivational for the “real world”. The effects in question are those of compulsory online teaching, so on a large scale, of all subjects from all disciplines. The authors modeled and implemented a database system that includes several types of tests to generate representative samples from the university population. In the content of the article, two such tests are exemplified for a single one-semester discipline: “Computer programming and programming languages II”. The experience of the authors revealed, by comparison, practical ways to teach the theory provided in the states of functions in the real world, using exclusively the online or the mixed environment. Finally, we provide a brief conclusion and ideas for future work.
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