This paper presents the beam tracing with refraction method, developed to examine the possibility of creating the beam tracing simulation of sound propagation in environments with piecewise non- homogenous media. The beam tracing with refraction method (BTR) is developed as an adaptive beam tracing method that simulates not only the reflection but also the refraction of sound. The scattering and the diffraction of sound are not simulated. The BTR employs 2D and 3D topology in order to efficiently simulate scenes containing non-convex media. After the beam tracing is done all beams are stored in a beam tree and kept in the computer memory. The level of sound intensity at the beginning of each beam is also memorized. This beam data structure enables fast recalculation of results for stationary source and geometry. The BTR was compared with two commercial ray tracing simulations, to check the speed of BTR algorithms. This comparison demonstrated that the BTR has a performance similar to state-of- the-art room-acoustics simulations. To check the ability to simulate refraction, the BTR was compared with a commercial Finite Elements Method (FEM) simulation. In this comparison the BTR simulated the focusing of the ultrasound with an acoustic lens, with good accuracy and excellent performance.

This paper presents a method of correcting the effects caused by refraction phenomena in an optical measurement system. The correction algorithm proposed can be applied in many different photogrammetric applications affected by these effects. To validate this algorithm, a foot sole optical measurement system that uses several cameras to build a mesh of a foot sole has been used. This measurement system has six cameras that are protected by a safety glass that separates the cameras from the foot to be measured. The safety glass produces an air-glass-air interface that causes the refraction phenomena, producing deformations in the images. Due to the deformations it is impossible to obtain reliable metric information of the images captured using the measurement system. The developed correction algorithm is based on a grid layout and associated polynomials and makes it possible to correct the deformations and extract accurate metric information.

Cam Mountain in An Giang Province, Vietnam, is a granite peak that is severely fractured and eroded on its slopes and summit. Trees cover the top of the mountain and around the side of the mountain. The roads are the primary means of transportation for indigenous people and tourists daily. Recently, there has been a phenomenon of large-sized boulders rolling down from the top of the mountain, causing an accident and killing tourists. To investigate the internal causes of landslides on a 2.3 km road stretch, geophysical profiles using GPR and seismic refraction methods were conducted to clarify the current status of geological structures beneath the road surface. The refractive seismic data analysis revealed four distinct layers based on elastic wave propagation velocity. Velocity values range from 1000 to 3000 m/s for the 2 upper layers corresponding to the weathered, broken, and highly fractured rock layers and in the lower 2 layers from 3000 to more than 4500 m/s, respectively corresponding to less fractured rock on the depth of more than 50 m. According to GPR data, the structural cross-section to an average depth of 30 m is a more complex picture. Detected 6 layers with different degrees of fracture cracking and showing different structural zones. In a few places are the drainage creeks from the mountain. These places need to be monitored regularly to have a basis for predicting landslides and rockfalls in the area of Cam Mountain. Landslides occur in geological rocks which are of different ages: claystone, mudstone, siltstone, shale, or marlstone. The rock-falls occur in more compact rocks: metamorphic or igneous rocks.

Two highly sensitive optical sensor topologies are proposed and simulated in this paper. The proposed structures are optimized to provide better performance characteristics such as sensitivity, detection limit, and quality factor. They are based on two-dimensional photonic crystals consisting of rectangular arrays of GaAs rods in SiO2 substrates. Such lattices have bandgaps for transverse magnetic modes. Two-dimensional finite difference time domain and plane wave expansion methods are used for the simulation and analysis of the refractive index sensors and particle swarm optimization method is used to optimize the structural parameters. The designed structures show a high sensitivity to refractive index variations. They are able to detect refractive indices from 1.33 to 1.5. An excellent figure of merit equal to 737 RIU−1 is observed for the proposed structure and a significant improvement is observed compared to the structures reported in the literature.

Local weather conditions have an impact on the availability of free-space optical (FSO) communication. The variation in meteorological parameters, such as temperature, humidity, and wind speed, leads to variations of the refractive index along the transmission path. These refractive index inhomogeneities produced by atmospheric turbulence induce optical turbulence which is responsible for random fluctuations in the intensity of the laser beam that carries the signal (irradiance) called scintillations that can significantly degrade the performance of FSO systems. This paper aims to investigate the feasibility of deploying FSO communication technology under scintillation effects in any urban region and atmospheric environment. To achieve that, firstly by utilizing the Hufnagel-Vally day with the Sadot and Kopeika models together, the scintillation strength for a specified region, Sulaimani City in north-eastern Iraq as an example, has been estimated through the calculation of the refractive index structure parameter (Cn2) over a period of 10 years and it was found to be at the strong turbulence level. Secondly, from the same estimated parameter, the scintillation attenuation of the signal carrying the laser beam intensity can be calculated to investigate the feasibility of FSO communication using Optysistem-7 software. The optimal link distance for north-eastern Iraq (Sulaimani City) has been found to be within the limit of about 5.5 km. Analysing the max. Q-factor, bit-error rate and signal to noise ratio for an average of 120 months between 2013–2022 assessed the best and worst seasons for FSO.

In this work the influence of the cavity parameters on optical losses of a simple intensity-based in-line refractive index sensor utilizing a micromachined side-hole fibre was studied by means of numerical simulations. To perform these simulations, the Authors used the finite-difference time-domain method. The proposed sensor setup consists of light source, micromachined optical fibre as a sensor head, and a detector which makes it low-cost and easy to build. The changes of the external refractive index can be, therefore, recovered by direct measurements of the transmitted intensity from which insertion loss values can be calculated. By changing geometry of the cavity micromachined into the side-hole optical fibre, it was possible to determine its influence on the final sensor sensitivity and measurements range. Based on the provided analysis of simulations results, a simple fibre optic sensor can be fabricated mainly for sensing external liquids refractive index for application in biochemistry or healthcare.

Pavements are layered systems from both the geometrical and physical points of view. Flexible pavements most often include a sequence of asphalt layers, typically composed of the wearing course, binder course and base course. So far, there is no definite analytical solution of such a layered system in relation to the temperature distribution that would consider different thermal properties of the respective layers and follow the physical laws of the thermal wave nature of heat propagation. This being so, we are unable to assess the effect of the thermal properties of the respective pavement courses on the overall temperature distribution in the asphalt portion. In multi-layer pavement systems also important are the phenomena taking place at the interfaces between the pavement courses which have a bearing on the service life of pavement. This article presents a newanalytical solution to the problem of heat conduction and refraction in a multi-layer pavement. The solution was used to investigate and determine the effect of wave mode of heat propagation on the vertical temperature distribution, this considering that the pavement system is a sequence of layers comprising the soil subgrade, the base course and the wearing course. Moreover, the classical heat conduction equation is compared with the wave mode equation for a multi-layer pavement system and the temperature distribution in a layered system is compared with the temperature distribution in its homogenized equivalent. The solution of the heat conduction problem in a layered system showed a considerable effect of the thermal compatibility coefficients introduced by the authors and of the thermal refraction of the respective layers on the temperature distribution throughout the multi-layer pavement system. The output of this research includes prediction of the vertical temperature distribution in the pavement and definition of guidelines for reducing the effect of changing climatic conditions on the operation of layered flexible road and airfield pavements. In addition, the research results expand the toolkit for assessing the thermal effect on the actual pavements.