The sol-gel process is a friendly room temperature method to prepare transparent glasses in the form of monoliths, films, and fibers. The zinc oxide films have been obtained by sol-gel method, which are very important materials in the ceramic technology due to their piezoelectric properties and applications in various pressure transducers and acoustic-optic devices, surface and bulk acoustic wave devices, and solar cells. Structure and characteristic ultraviolet-blue emissions of amorphous and crystalline zinc oxide thin films-coated glass substrates by dip-coating deposition are explained by photoluminescence studies in this chapter.

is study presents the damaged flexibility matrix method (DFM) to identify and determine the magnitude of damage in structural elements of plane frame buildings. Damage is expressed as the increment in flexibility along the damaged structural element. is method uses a new approach to assemble the flexibility matrix of the structure through an iterative process, and it adjusts the eigenvalues of the damaged flexibility matrices of each system element. e DFM was calibrated using numerical models of plane frames of buildings studied by other authors. e advantage of the DFM, with respect to other flexibility-based methods, is that DFM minimizes the adverse effect of modal truncation. e DFM demonstrated excellent accuracy with complete modal information, even when it was applied to a more realistic scenario, considering frequencies and modal shapes measured from the recorded accelerations of buildings stories. e DFM also presents a new approach to simulate the effects of noise by perturbing matrices of flexibilities. is approach can be useful for research on realistic damage detection. e combined effects of incomplete modal information and noise were studied in a ten-story four-bay building model taken from the literature. e ability of the DFM to assess structural damage was corroborated. Application of the proposed method to a ten-story four-bay building model demonstrates its efficiency to identify the flexibility increment in damaged structural elements.