A delegation from Iran visited South Ural State University. Representatives of the industrial complex of the Islamic Republic discussed the possibilities of cooperation with the university administration and saw the famous supercomputer of SUSU.
Within their visit, our guests from Iran discussed cooperation in science and academics with Aleksandr Shestakov, Rector of South Ural State University, met with Anton Korzhov, Vice-Rector for Research, talked to the scholars of materials science, and took a tour around the Artificial Intelligence Research and Education Centre.
The representatives of the industrial sector of Iran came to visit Chelyabinsk with a serious mission: to find technologies that can bring production to a new level. This is why the citizens of Iran visited South Urals State University, one of the major science centres in the Urals.
One of the issues industrialists face today is what to do with coal dust. Coal slag that goes to production is sieved and divided according to its size: the most popular sizes are from 20 to 80 mm and from 80 to 100 mm. The slag is pressed into briquettes that can be used as fuel. The upper limit of screening of the production machines is 20 mm. Therefore, residues from 0 to 20 mm are not sorted. They are the subject of interest for the industrialists from Iran.
"There are many types of coal dust in Iran and it is a promising market," explains Farhad Forouzandeh Mohammad, chief executive officer of the production and industrial complex Hableh Rood. “The benefit is obvious when working with dust sized less than 20 mm; no big investment is required to process it, as is the case for coal from 20 to 80 mm and 80 to 100 mm. This is practically free material. But we need technology to process these residues, we want to turn this dust into briquettes of a new shape.”
This is the ambitious task the Iranian representatives have set for SUSU scientists. According to Anton Korzhov, Vice-Rector for Research, industrialists from different regions of our country come to the university nearly every week with ideas that require a scientific mind to implement.
"Of course, we are interested in such tasks, because it allows our scientists to translate the results of fundamental research into applied research; to develop the intellectual potential of the university," says Anton Korzhov. “Today foreign colleagues have approached us, they explained the task in great detail, and they have their own idea of where they want to go. We agreed on the first step: our team of scientists should look at the chemical composition of the coal dust in question, and then we will suggest possible options.”
As a rule, after the first stage, if the parties agree on further cooperation, there is a more detailed discussion of the technical specifications; it is possible to involve industrial partners of SUSU who have the necessary knowledge.
South Ural State University is a university of digital transformations, where innovative research is conducted in most of the priority fields of science and technology development. In accordance with the strategy of scientific and technological development of the Russian Federation, the university is focused on the development of big scientific interdisciplinary projects in the field of digital industry, materials science, and ecology. In the Year of Science and Technology, SUSU became the winner in the competition under the Priority 2030 program. The university acts as a regional project office of the World-class Ural Interregional Research and Education Centre (UIREC).