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A major challenge faced by West Africa is to find comfortable housing as a result of climate change and population growth. The climatic adaptation of buildings and their indoor environment become an essential condition for maintaining the health and productivity of the occupants. This paper proposes a model to assess the thermal comfort of naturally ventilated buildings in hot and dry climates in Burkina Faso.

The proposed method is an adaptive model which relies on a combination of parameters such as the operative temperature, the new effective temperature and the basic parameters of thermal comfort. It consists in proposing the zones of thermal comfort on the diagram of the humid air for each climatic region.

A decision-making tool is set up for evaluating the comfort of buildings to better consider the bio-climatic concept through a long-term comfort index. This comfort index is defined and is used to assess the degree of thermal discomfort for various types of housing. Two natural ventilation pilot buildings located in Ouagadougou were considered. The results show that the pilot building whose wall are is made of Earth blocks achieves 26.4% of thermal comfort while the building made of hollow cement block achieves 25.8% of thermal comfort.

The decision-making tool proposed in the present study allow building stakeholders to better and easily design, assess and improve the thermal environment of buildings.

This paper aims to present a new one-variable first-order shear deformation theory (OVFSDT) using nonlocal elasticity concepts for buckling of graphene sheets.

The FSDT had errors in its assumptions owing to the assumption of constant shear stress distribution along the thickness of the plate, even though by using the shear correction factor (SCF), it has been slightly corrected, the errors have been remained owing to the fact that the exact value of SCF has not already been accurately identified. By using two-variable first-order shear deformation theories, these errors decreased further by removing the SCF. To consider nanoscale effects on the plate, Eringen’s nonlocal elasticity theory was adopted. The critical buckling loads were computed by Navier’s approach. The obtained numerical results were then compared with previous studies’ results using molecular dynamics simulations and other plate theories for validation which also showed the accuracy and simplicity of the proposed theory.

In comparing the biaxial buckling results of the proposed theory with the two-variable shear deformation theories and exact results, it revealed that the two-variable plate theories were not appropriate for the investigation of asymmetrical analyses.

A formulation for FSDT was innovated by reconsidering its errors to improve the FSDT for investigation of mechanical behavior of nanoplates.

The study aims to examine the factors affecting the customers' choice of Bangladeshi banks during the Covid-19 pandemic and the moderating effects of private and public banks on this association.

This study is based on explanatory research, where significant factors have been explored to evaluate the customers' perception of private and public banks in Bangladesh. Primary data are accumulated through an online survey from customers who have an account in a private or public bank in Bangladesh during the past four months, where 318 (non-probability convenience sampling) are usable, and secondary data are collected from various sources. Descriptive statistics, multiple and hierarchical multiple regressions have been conducted.

The results revealed that customers consider safe and secure websites, infrastructural facilities, technological know-how, service, price, time, payment, administrative and psychological factors in choosing Bangladeshi banks during Covid-19. Moreover, the results show that private and public banks have moderated these associations.

During Covid-19, few studies were conducted on Pakistani, Sri Lankan and Ethiopian banking customers, where different factors are significant; however, this study is unique because all factors are significant for Bangladeshi banking customers. The findings will originate the value with several theoretical implications and managerial guidelines.