Kemerovo students presented projects for the sustainable development of industry

The production of synthetic oil, the production of "small" electricity and the saving of millions of rubles. Students of Kuzbass State Technical University named after T.F. Gorbachev (KuzSTU) presented their projects at the qualifying stage of the IX International Engineering Championship "CASE-IN". The best teams will have a chance to represent Kuzbass university at the final stage of this one of the most prestigious competitions in its field in Moscow in May this year.

In the fight for the finals

To begin with, it is worth noting that, according to the "legend" of the qualifying stage, its participants had to defend technological solutions for industry to experts, which the teams developed in just ten days. The cases for all areas are devoted to a single theme of the championship – "Sustainable development".

The future miners of KuzSTU were solving a case, the main object of which is the Udachny mine in the Mirninsky district of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia). They calculated the volume of air supplied to the underground mine workings for their ventilation, as well as cost optimization for these activities.

Students of the KuzSTU Institute of Energy proposed competitive sites and architecture options for the AEC, an active energy complex, for their regional energy system. It acts as one of the mechanisms that allow consumers to reduce their electricity bills by reducing their workload at certain hours of the day.

Students of the Institute of Chemical and Oil and Gas Technologies of KuzSTU had to create a system of indicators to assess the contribution of one of the product lines of one of the largest petrochemical companies in Russia.

The university has been participating in the CASE-IN championship since 2012. And all this time, KuzSTU students have been actively participating in it. At first, the championship was held in the format of solving engineering cases in the field of mining. Since 2015, KuzSTU has been implementing the Electric Power Industry direction, and in 2021 a new direction was opened – Petrochemistry. This year, a total of 7 teams applied for participation in the Mining sector, 8 teams in the Petrochemical sector, and 10 teams in the Electric Power industry. Thus, a total of 25 student teams from KuzSTU will compete for the right to reach the semifinals and then the finals of the CASE-IN.

The special significance of this international student project lies in the fact that it allows us to identify and support promising students, as well as assist them in obtaining practical knowledge, experience and new competencies, promotes the popularization of engineering and technical education and attract young specialists to the fuel and energy complex. The latter, by the way, is worth noting especially. The skills acquired during the participation in the CASE-IN championship make it possible to significantly raise the competitive qualities of graduates of Kuzbass University, which, in turn, allows them to apply for prestigious jobs in the real sector of the Russian economy. And not only in the Kemerovo region, but also in other regions of our country.

Less air means less money.

And now let's return to the cases themselves, which were developed by KuzSTU students. Let's start with the miners. For example, the team of the Mining Institute of KuzSTU, consisting of fourth-year students Victoria Khmelevskaya, Ruslan Falyakhov, Roman Kozlov and Olga Dolbni, was just dealing with the topic announced above: the organization of ventilation of a kimberlite pipe at a diamond mine and its optimization. As the contestants themselves noted, the specifics of this assignment consisted in the fact that the guys had to solve a completely real problem at a particular enterprise. And this, in turn, allows you to get not theoretical, but quite practical knowledge and skills that will be useful to future engineers.

"The bottom line is that there is currently an excessive amount of ventilation at the mine. And this, in turn, leads to unreasonably high costs. We have proposed a two-component solution to this problem. First, install a less powerful fan. Secondly, start using special partitions in the waste areas. As a result of the implementation of the second proposal, the amount of output that needs to be subjected to degassing measures will be significantly reduced. This will further reduce the load on the ventilation equipment.", – said the representatives of the mining team.

According to the economic calculations of the students, as a result of the implementation of their project, the diamond mine will be able to reduce costs by 4 million rubles per year only by optimizing ventilation. This is a very real saving from seemingly simple student work. Perhaps such a successful technical and financial solution was made possible by a kind of intra-university collaboration. Future engineers brought in a representative of the KuzSTU Economic Institute to solve their case. And the result was savings of millions of rubles literally out of thin air.

Oil from gas

Equally interesting, both industrially and economically, may be the solution to the case of sustainable development of a large Russian chemical giant, which was proposed by representatives of the Chemical Institute of KuzSTU Kristina Sheludko, Lilia Solovyova, Yana Morozova and Grigory Nikolaev.

As follows from the terms of the case, the students had to develop proposals that, on the one hand, should take into account the profile of the Russian holding company. On the other hand, to partially ensure the diversification of its activities, which means increasing its sustainability.

KuzSTU students have proposed at least two solutions. The first involves launching a plastic recycling line on the basis of one of the holding's enterprises – the familiar PET, from which, for example, plastic bottles are made. Given the huge amount of these containers on the market, there will definitely be no shortage of raw materials for processing. On the other hand, a fairly large range of new products can be produced from the plastic chips obtained as a result of processing. Including the same plastic bottle.

According to the contestants' calculations, the cost of the plastic recycling line varies from one to three million rubles. To begin with, the students suggested choosing equipment capable of processing about 600 kilograms of raw materials. The payback period for this project is just over two years.

The second, equally interesting proposal concerns two gases, propane and butane, which are used in industrial production at a chemical holding company. Its essence is that the exhaust gases must be subjected to post-treatment and then synthetic oil and gas must be produced from them. Of course, such a product will also be in high demand on the market, since the same oil, the cost of which should be noticeably lower than "natural", is needed in almost any field of modern human activity.

And it's warm, and it's bright, and it's profitable

And finally, the team is a representative of the Institute of Energy of KuzSTU, which includes Daria Savenkova, Stanislav Sevalnev, Egor Zimbalist and Anastasia Aksenova. Energy engineering students have developed a case concerning the so-called AEC – active energy complexes, one of the mechanisms that allow consumers to reduce electricity costs by reducing their workload at certain hours of the day.

But this is only one of the components of the AEC.

In fact, AEC is the very generation that allows relatively small and even fairly large enterprises to significantly reduce heating and electricity costs.

The main idea of the AEC is that modern Russian legislation allows enterprises to have their own thermal power generation (or cogeneration) on their territory. As a result, two tasks can be solved. First, to provide your own needs with heat and electricity at cost. Secondly, it is easy to sell the excess energy produced to third-party consumers, and as a result, earn money.

So, according to the proposal of KuzSTU students, at least three such AEC can be installed in Kemerovo only in the near future. One of them is at Kemerovo airport. According to the representatives of the team, a power plant is currently being installed here, which should run on gas and provide heat for the facility's own needs.

However, the young power engineers from KuzSTU offered a more energy-efficient, and therefore financially efficient solution. Install a gas turbine that will operate on the principle of cogeneration, producing both heat and electricity. Moreover, as representatives of the Kuzbass university are sure, excess electric energy can be sold to third-party buyers, for example, to nearby country associations.

Once again, it is worth emphasizing that almost all the cases that KuzSTU students solved as part of 25 teams within the framework of the CASE-IN championship were exclusively applied. Therefore, we can hope that in addition to a worthy place in the championship itself, the recognition of the talent of future graduates of Kuzbass university will also be the implementation of at least some of these cases in real life.

A source