International Scientific Journals
of Scientific Technical Union of Mechanical Engineering "Industry 4.0"

Cities today are highly endangered by the global urbanization trends and the sustainability issues that they may bring. With the increasing environmental awareness and the development of technology, there is an urgent need to rethink how we plan and manage our cities. With the advancements in technology, we are entering the era of smart cities where information and communication technologies are used to collect large amount of data to transform city economies, social cohesion and city governance. This paper explains the concept of the smart city and its characteristics which can be used to solve the sustainability problems that the city may face. Following the introduction, the paper continues by presenting six main characteristics of smart cities and their role in sustainability. The chapter then proceeds to a description of a smart sustainable city model that derives from merging three main city models related to sustainability and smartness, namely the eco-city, compact city and data driven city. Finally, the application of smart city technologies that are being used to achieve sustainability in some randomly chosen cities is presented and discussed.

Design of high-voltage insulators with a capacity of 12 kV and 24 kV according to standard specifications and determination of the mechanical properties in virtual environment, as well as verification and validation of the results in laboratory conditions was the aim of this paper. The composition of the insulators was 50 vol. % epoxy resin and 50 vol. % SiO2. Based on the physical and mechanical parameters of high-voltage insulators, 3D models were generated to correlate with them. Virtual simulations of the optimized models were performed by using SolidWorks software based on Finite Element Method. In order to re-examine the results, laboratory tests on physical specimens for determination of tensile, compression and three-point bending strength were conducted. The simulations were positively verified and gave promising results. The research conclusions show that the simulations in virtual environment provide easier and faster design and development of high-voltage  insulators, which is of great importance for power transmission network industry.

Forging is an experience-oriented technology. The physical phenomena that describe the forging operations are difficult to express with quantitative relationships. In order to avoid the trail-and-error method, we use numerical simulations for studying the forging process. With the help of these simulations, the engineers are able to uncover the potential defects which may happen during the forging process. Concurrent Engineering (CE) helps in making the forging process more effective. In the CE system, each modification of the product represents a taxonomical relationship between specifications, outputs, and the concept it represents. In the study, the forging process of a disc shaped part is analysed. Thanks to numerical simulations it is determined that the dimensions of the billet are larger than needed. This resulted in overfilling the flash of the tool, thus the simulation was unsuccessful. After correcting the dimensions of the billet, the simulation ran with no interruptions.

Sustainable transport, as one of the areas on which sustainable development should be founded, depends more and more on introduction of electric vehicles in daily traffic. This paper describes part of the results of wider research related to the analysis of all sustainable transport indicators. Since introduction of electric vehicles is supposed to be done stage by stage in the actual transport, deep understanding of its main parameters/indicators is a prerequisite for reliable analysis. The paper identifies traffic and vehicle structure parameters and rang them in hierarchic order. This structure can serve as substructure in more complex structure of all transport parameters in wider researches.