José A. Ballesteros

By José A. Ballesteros, Samuel Quintana and Marcos D. Fernandez

Airborne sound insulation in buildings, whether in fixed partition elements, like partitions or party walls, or mobile elements, like doors or screens, is always related to the performance of the weakest element involved. In situ assessment of airborne sound insulation in building elements can be carried out by pressure techniques or sound intensity techniques. Sound pressure techniques are very quick but fail to discriminate the sound insulation contribution of each building element involved. Sound intensity techniques, on the other hand, allow to determine the sound transmission of each element and also to discriminate indirect transmissions up to a certain degree. In order to find areas with high sound transmission, such as leakages or weakened regions, a large number of measurements on the building element surface have to be performed. Moreover, the sound intensity technique is very time-consuming, because it is necessary to carry out the measurement in each grid point defined. This chapter describes the use of beamforming and SONAH techniques to detect areas with lower airborne sound insulation in a building element. These techniques unify the advantages of both, pressure and sound intensity techniques, allowing the quick visualization of leakages or weakened areas of different building elements.

Part of the book: Acoustics of Materials

By José A. Ballesteros, María Jesús Ballesteros, Samuel Quintana and Marcos D. Fernandez

According to the European Law, noise maps in cities have to be worked out and updated every 5 years. Because of this, it is interesting to establish new methodologies to develop and update the noise maps in a more efficient way. Although there are specific standards to carry out noise maps and a good practice guide was defined, there is not a common procedure in the definition of the noise map. In each research, a specific methodology is defined based on the experience of the researchers and the characteristics of the town. In this work, a methodology based on a street typology classification is proposed to be applied to noise maps. This methodology allows allocation of the mean power and the temporal behavior to each street from its characteristics and the time profiles measured with semi-permanent noise monitoring systems. The methodology was developed, tested, and validated in the city of Cuenca (Spain) and the results obtained are shown in this chapter.

Part of the book: Noise Control

By Darío Herraiz, Leticia Martínez, José A. Ballesteros, Marcos D. Fernandez, Héctor Esteban and Ángel Belenguer

Manufacture of hybrid 3D-planar circuits, especially those incorporating empty waveguides on substrates, can benefit from most standardized planar fabrication processes, although they are not exactly the same. For this reason, planar circuit manufacturing methods must be adapted to the requirements of these new circuits. Through numerous fabrications and successful designs, several enhancing strategies have been established to improve all the manufacturing phases to achieve better results. They all have been proved in the following substrate-integrated technologies for the manufacturing of microwave devices: ESIW, ESICL, continuous profile, and microstrip. Thanks to these improvements, good-quality prototypes such as transitions, filters, circulators, couplers, antennas, among others, have been fabricated. Throughout the next chapter, these strategies applied along the manufacturing process will be explained: from the first manufacturing phase to the final welding of the whole circuit and taking into account external elements such as wires that may be present in these structures. For this purpose, some devices that have been published will be used as examples.

Part of the book: Hybrid Planar