The paper presents a proposition of the theoretical-experimental method of determination of power losses in the transversely vibrating rubber V-belt of continuously variable transmission. The article comprises the results of experimental tests conducted on a special test stand with a complete scooter drivetrain powered by a small two-stroke internal combustion engine. Such a configuration allows ensuring real CVT working conditions. A high-speed camera was used for the contactless measurement of belt vibrations and time-lapse image analysis was performed in dedicated software. An axially moving Euler–Bernoulli beam was assumed as the mathematical model. Longitudinal vibrations and nonlinear effects were omitted. Additionally, it was assumed that the belt material behaves according to the Kelvin–Voigt rheological model. Analysis of the damped free vibrations of the cantilever beam, made of the belt segment, allowed to determine the equivalent bending damping coefficient. The CVT power losses, due to bending in the rubber transmission belt, were obtained for the fixed working conditions after numerical calculations. The proposed methodology is a new approach in this research area, which allows to obtain results impossible to achieve with other measurement methods.

Electricity storage is one of the best-known methods of balancing the energy supply and demand at a given moment. The article presents an innovative solution for the construction of an electric energy storage device obtained from an innovative photovoltaic panel made of new dye-based photovoltaic modules and newly developed supercapacitors – which can be used as an emergency power source. In the paper, for the first time, we focused on the successful paring of new dye-sensitized solar cell (DSSC) with novel supercapacitors. In the first step, a microprocessor stand was constructed using Artificial Intelligence algorithms to control the parameters of the environment, as well as the solar charger composed of six DSSC cells with the dimensions of 100_100 mm and 126 CR2032 coin cells with a total capacitance of 60 F containing redox-active aqueous electrolyte. It was proven that the solar charger store enough energy to power, i.e. SOS transmitter or igniters, using a 5 V signal.

This paper proposes three methods of the optimal smart meter selection for acting as a data concentrator in the automatic meter reading last mile network. The study explains the reasons why the selected smart meter should also act as a data concentrator, in addition to its basic role. To select the smart meter, either the reliability of communication or the speed of the automatic meter reading process was considered. Graph theory is employed to analyse the last mile network, described as sets of nodes and unreliable links. The frame error ratio was used to assess the unreliability whilst the number of hops was used to describe the speed of the reading process. The input data for the analysis are qualitative parameters determined based on observations in the real, operated last mile networks as well as their typical topological arrangements. The results of the research can be useful in the last mile network migration process, which uses concentrators to the networks without them, or during the process of newer last mile network implementation, where data concentrators are no longer applicable. The efficiency of the proposed methods is assessed measurably.

The eigenvalues assignment problems for descriptor linear systems with state and its derivative feedbacks are considered herein. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of solutions to the problems are established. The Euler and Tustin approximations of the continuous-time systems are analyzed. Procedures for computation of the feedbacks are given and illustrated by numerical examples.