Yuzhny Kuzbass reached the final of the "CASE-IN"

The Southern Kuzbass Coal Company (part of the Mechel Group) has won the regional stage of the CASE-IN International Championship. Southerners became the first among the 16 national teams of the largest industrial associations of the Siberian Federal District.

The tenth engineering championship for solving cases of fuel and energy and mineral resource complexes was held at the Irkutsk National Research Technical University. The teams of energy, oil, and gas companies presented their innovative developments. 　

The Yuzhny Kuzbass team included Ivan Kravchenko, mining engineer at the Lenin Mine, Mikhail Maleev, shift supervisor at the Krasnogorsky mine, Sergey Komashko, a payroll specialist at the company, and Ekaterina Sharapova, a leading economist at the planning and analysis department of open-pit coal mining. The team's expert was Andrey Roiz, Director of the Department of Automated Process Control Systems. 　

This year, the participants worked on the theme "Flexible systems and solutions: on the eve of the Fourth Industrial Revolution." Southerners has developed its solutions in accordance with the main directions of the fourth industrial revolution – Industry 4.0. Its approach is based on the massive introduction of information technology and artificial intelligence into production, as well as global automation of business processes.　

For the project, the team chose the already developed coal chemical direction. Young engineers propose to process synthesis gas obtained by gasification of coal. Processed products such as carbon fibers and methanol are in high demand in the leading sectors of the Russian economy. The Southerners also paid attention to the environmental side of the issue. They have found useful applications for industrial waste – ash and soot – in construction and mechanical engineering.　

"The development that our guys turned to still exists at the experimental level. But I think these solutions can form the basis of real production. Coal mining followed by deep processing of minerals is the industry's tomorrow, which needs to be prepared for today," says Andrey Podmazhenko, Managing Director of PJSC Yuzhny Kuzbass.

A source: Kuzbass News