European and Czech directives and technical standards, approved in several last years, force substantial changes in thermal behaviour of all buildings, including new and reconstructed one- or more-family houses, block of fl ats, etc., especially radical decrease of their energy requirements. This stimulates the development of advanced materials, structures and technologies. Since no reliable experience with their design is available, robust and non-expensive computational simulation approaches,...

We present a finite element method to compute guided modes in a stratified medium. The major difficulty to overcome is related to the unboundedness of the stratified medium. Our method is an alternative to the use of artificial boundary conditions and to the use of integral representation formulae. The domain is bounded in such a way we can write the solution on its lateral boundaries in terms of Fourier series. The series is then truncated for the computations over the bounded domain. The problem...

We present a finite element method to compute guided modes in a stratified medium. The major difficulty to overcome is related to the unboundedness of the stratified medium. Our method is an alternative to the use of artificial boundary conditions and to the use of integral representation formulae. The domain is bounded in such a way we can write the solution on its lateral boundaries in terms of Fourier series. The series is then truncated for the computations over the bounded domain. The problem...