In modern times, when climate change is getting more and more drastic and issues like CO2 emission and energy efficiency are becoming more and more important, it is necessary to find possible energy savings in every area. To achieve these possible savings also in the residential area it is essential to establish Intelligent Building Automation in residential buildings. Therefore, within the fra...

Infrared thermography has proved to be an adequate technique for building inspection, as it can be used to determine energy efficiency through the measurement of heat losses, air leaks and infiltrations, and also to detect humidity areas. These parameters have great influence in energy consumption of buildings and in their users' well-being, which is demonstrated by the appearance of regulation...

In recent years, the image processing plays a major role in real world and that are utilized in many of the application domains. Besides the other, in the field of remote sensing the contribution of images is thunderstruck. Nowadays, a wide number of buildings are updated often; this can be updated in the cartographical database which is comprised of remote sensing images of buildings. Updating...

The particularity of cultural heritage and its interaction with the theme of energy efficiency has often been analysed either for the purposes of integrating climate control systems in listed buildings, which can be quite a complicated problem [ASHRAE, 2003] [CIBSE, 2002], or in the framework of the conservation of cultural heritage, using approaches which at times can be overly sectoral – [Tet...

We study the Casimir force on a single surface immersed in an inhomoge-neous medium. Specifically we study the vacuum fluctuations of a scalar field with a spatially varying squared mass, m 2 + λ∆(x − a) + V (x), where V is a smooth potential and ∆(x) is a unit-area function sharply peaked around x = 0. ∆(x − a) represents a semi-penetrable thin plate placed at x = a. In the limits {∆(x−a) → δ(...

Seismic-protection measures make it possible to significantly decrease economical losses. Seismic shock absorption systems and seismic insulation of foundations and buildings can generally increase the reliability of structures. Calculations by Ja. M. Ajzenberg showed that relative horizontal seismic shifts of floors in seismically insulated buildings are significantly lower than in noninsulate...

In the framework of the European SCenarios for tsunami Hazard-induced Emergencies MAnagement (SCHEMA) project (www.schemaproject.org), we empirically developed new tsunami damage functions to be used for quantifying the potential tsunami damage to buildings along European-Mediterranean coasts. Since no sufficient post-tsunami observations exist in the Mediterranean areas, we based our work on d...

A wide range of health effects among occupants are associated with the exposure to bioaerosols from fungal sources. Although the accurate role of these aerosols in causing the symptoms and diseases is poorly understood, the important effect of bioaerosol exposure on human health is well recognized. Thus, there is a need to determine all of the contributing factors related to the concentration o...

Compared with optical sensors, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) can provide important damage information due to its ability to map areas affected by earthquakes independently from weather conditions and solar illumination. In 2013, a new TerraSAR-X mode named staring spotlight (ST), whose azimuth resolution was improved to 0.24 m, was introduced for various applications. This data source made it ...