Questionnaire
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1 Questionnaire Summary of the main activities of a scientific Organisation of the Slovak Academy of Sciences Period: January 1, 2003 - December 31, 2006 I. Formal information on the assessed Organisation: 1. Legal name and address Institute of Construction and Architecture Dúbravská cesta 9 845 03 Bratislava 45 Slovak Republic 2. Executive body of the Organisation and its composition Directoriat name age years in the position director Ing. Peter Matiašovský, CSc. 50 2005 deputy director prof. RNDr. Vladimír Sládek, DrSc. 53 2005 scientific secretary Ing. Jozef Kriváček, CSc. 50 2002 3. Head of the Scientific Board doc. Dr. Ing. arch. Henrieta Moravčíková 4. Basic information about the research personnel i. Number of employees with a university degree (PhD students excluded) engaged in research and development and their full time equivalent work capacity (FTE) in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and average number during the assessment period 2 ii. Organisation units/departments and their FTE employees with the university degree engaged in research and development 20032004 2005 2006 average Research staff No. FTE No. FTE No. FTE No. FTE No. FTE organisation in whole 26 23,14 30 26,7 31 25,77 33 26,54 30 25,538 Department of mechanics 5 4,3 6 5,05 7 5,63 7 5,8 6,25 5,195 Department of structures 77776676,216,756,5525 Department of materials and rheology 4 4 6 4,72 6 5,04 5 5 5,25 4,69 Department of building physics 5 3,83 5 4,5 6 4,25 7 5,16 5,75 4,435 Department of architecture 4 3,01 5 4,43 5 3,85 6 3,52 5 3,7025 Mechanical and technological laboratories 11111110,8510,9625 5. Basic information on the funding i. Total salary budget1 of the Organisation allocated from the institutional resources of the Slovak Academy of Sciences (SAS) in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, and average amount for the assessment period Salary budget 2003 2004 2005 2006 average total salary budget (millions of SKK) 12,725 13,469 14,026 14,494 13,679 6. URL of the Organisation’s web site www.ustarch.sav.sk II. General information on the research and development activity of the Organisation: 1. Mission Statement of the Organisation as presented in its Foundation Charter The institute is orientated towards the fundamental research of: • the mechanical, temperature and acoustic fields in complex structures exposed to the impacts of various types of loads, • the resistance of structures, 1 Sum of the brutto salaries without the fund contributions. 3 • principles of the processes of hydration and creating the pore structure and the resulting physico-mechanical properties of silicate composites, • the heat, moisture and air transport in structures, • the influence of light and solar radiation on the creation of interior environment, • theory and critics of architecture. The institute provides consulting and other expert services connecting with the main activity of the institution. The institute carries out a doctoral study in the meaning of universally valid legal directives. The institute provides the publication of scientific and research results by means of periodical and non-periodical press. The publishing of the periodical and non-periodical press follows resolutions of the Presidium of SAS. 2. Summary of R&D activity pursued by the Organisation during the assessed period, from both national and international aspects and its incorporation in the European Research Area (max. 10 pages) Since the last accreditation the institute workers have published 6 abroad monographs, 72 scientific publications in journals indexed by CC database, 41 scientific publications in journals covered by other databases, 213 publications in proceedings of international scientific conferences and a lot of other scientific and expert works of lower significance as the mentioned ones. The number of publications per a research employee corresponds to the parameters of leading international research institutions in the fields of building mechanics and physics as well as in the field of building materials research. In technical sciences the median of the impact factors is 0.3. The quality of our scientific publications can be documented by the fact that we have 459 citations in the database WOS, which represents the fictive impact factor 6.4 per a CC publication. This parameter expresses that the scientific papers in CC journals belong to better-than-average by their quality. The total number of the quotations is 928. The institute researchers worked out 192 reviews on the submitted scientific works to the journals and proceedings and 105 reviews of the submitted grant projects. The total number of the invited lectures for the abroad scientific conferences was 32. The invited lectures oftentimes have a character of keynote or section lectures. The institute workers acted as section chairpersons at the scientific conferences and the members of the editorial boards abroad. The increasing scientific quality of the institute can be documented by the nearly 60% increase of the citations in WOS per a researcher in a comparison with the previous period 2000 - 2003 assessed by the last accreditation. The mentioned results were realised within the activities in 33 national and 23 international scientific projects within the framework of 14 research programmes. In the assessed period a lot of original scientific results were achieved. We mention only some of them, in the division according to particular departments of the institute: Department of mechanics An analysis of the impacts of mechanical, thermal and other loadings to the continual media, of the solid phase predominantly, was the topic of the interests of scientific workers. From the physical point of view this was about the investigation of mechanical, temperature, acoustic and electromagnetic fields, as well as their mutual interactions. An international community acknowledges the contribution to the elaboration of regularised integral formulations of the boundary element method (BEM), original numerical procedures leading to the increase of the method accuracy and the determination of criteria for the correctness of the modelling of the boundary and physical variables. Applying the BEM for the boundary problems with cracks the appreciation was achieved in the field of fracture mechanics, predominantly owing 4 to the elaboration of the effective calculation procedures for determination of the fracture characteristics. A swift development of the material research and technologies of material engineering in the last decades offered designers opportunity to utilise a new palette of the unknown up to now properties of non-traditional materials in the modern structures design. So-called functionally gradient materials are one of the significant groups of the modern materials, non-traditional composites, in which the programmed material properties are acquired with the use of continually changing material parameters as the result of a controlled volumetric mixing. In this way new target parameters during the structures optimisation are obtained and the numerical simulations became more significant and complex, as due to variable material parameters, as a need of the consideration of many physical fields interaction. Classical numerical methods appeared ineffective and non-applicable in certain problems. Therefore it is necessary to search new calculation methods and the element-free formulations seem to be very suitable for the boundary problems solution in continual non-homogeneous media. The institute has received the international acknowledgement immediately after early publications on the numerical method based on the of Petrov-Galerkin formulation for local regions with element-free approximations. The workers were invited to present keynote lectures at premier international conferences they obtained invitations to the scientific stays funded by the host, the invitations to participate in common projects and also to lecture to PhD students abroad. The institute organized the 1st Int. Conf. on Meshless Methods in Stara Lesna, Slovakia (2005) with editing the monograph Advances in Meshless Methods, Tech. Science Press, Forsyth, USA, 2006. The 2nd ICCES Symp. on Meshless Methods, 14-16 June 2006, Dubrovnik, Croatia was co-organized by the assistance of the institute. Although the origin of meshless methods is dated to 1977, when one of such formulations has been used for modelling astrophysical phenomena without boundaries, the research effort devoted to them started to graduate in the last decade. A traditional mesh generation for discretization of domains and/or their boundaries is reduced to the use of a set of nodal points with replacing the classical approximation in terms of interpolation polynomials within the elements by new kinds of approximation on the set of nodal points. These new conceptual ideas have influenced each of three most frequently used numerical methods in solution of boundary value problems, i.e. the finite difference method, the finite element method and the boundary integral equation method. The local integral equations together with the so-called MLS approximation have appeared to be very effective. A remarkable progress has been achieved in the Institute of Construction and Architecture SAS by the development of such a formulation for solution of various kinds of boundary value problems, where a pure boundary integral formulation is not available. This is the case of non-linear problems as well as problems in media with variable material parameters. Moreover, the treatment of inertia terms effects appears to be effective in this way, too. The method based on the use of local integral equations in combination with the MLS approximation has been developed for large deflections of plates, dynamic loading of plates, elasto-dynamic and heat conduction problems even in functionally graded materials. The new proposed methods have been investigated form the point of view of the numerical stability, convergence of accuracy, and computational efficiency. Within the solution of the FP6 project EÚ KMM-NoE for the analysis of a crack in two- dimensional anisotropic linearly elastic bodies with continuously changing material properties an original and very effective numerical method was developed.