The podium of the winners of the qualifying stage of the "CASE–IN" championship was taken by the teams of SPbGUPTD

This week for St. Petersburg State University of Industrial Technologies and Design was marked by the qualifying stages of the International Engineering Championship "CASE-IN", which was held for the first time in the new field of "Thermal Power Engineering" with the support of Gazprom Energoholding LLC.

The venue of the competition, which is included in the list of flagship projects of the presidential platform of the Autonomous Non—Governmental Organization "Russia- the land of Opportunities", was the Higher School of Technology and Energy of SPbGUPTD. The podium of the winners at the end of the final competitions was taken by the teams of the university hosting the championship. This season, only participants from NArFU were able to compete with them, but the first three places remained with the thermal power engineers of the St. Petersburg University.

The teams were asked to find an effective method for identifying defective areas of thermal and mechanical equipment that could reduce economic losses. The decision of the winning team from SPbGUPTD was based on the synergy of traditional and new technologies, which, according to the students, will not only reduce the time of scheduled repairs, but also significantly save finances.

"Our proposed technology consists of a three-phase method for detecting defects during a scheduled shutdown of the recovery boiler. We proposed archiving temperature readings on the metal condition of pipe surfaces in the interval from a warning signal of temperature rise to a protective shutdown of equipment, as well as inspecting equipment in places of elevated temperature using a high-frequency acoustic flaw detector. This way we will be able to reduce the number of unnecessary sections of pipe metal walls for testing their strength in laboratories by up to 20%, and reduce the likelihood of new substandard welded joints during re-installation. Saving time will make it 5-8 days faster to turn on the combined-cycle gas plant, thus the station will not lose extra money due to prolonged equipment downtime," said Polina Gavrilina, the leader of the winning team, a student at the Higher School of Technology and Energy of St. Petersburg State Pedagogical University.

The winning team received a ticket to the semifinals, where the guys will demonstrate their skills in competition with youth engineering teams from other Russian universities. The champions will join the managerial personnel reserve of large Russian companies and gain new career opportunities. The winners will also participate in industry youth educational forums.

Gazprom Energoholding considers the championship as a platform for developing the professional qualities of industry youth who will be able to join its talent pool and introduce fresh ideas into production processes," Dmitry Gavrilov, a leading specialist at Gazprom Energoholding's Innovation Center, said in his address to the participants.

A source