In the name of progress of cement industry
The project for the establishment of a research center for the cement industry was launched at the Department of Cement and Composite Materials Technology. Doctor of technical sciences, head of the department, professor Ivan Nikolayevich Borisov spoke about his tasks and prospects of work.
- How did you come up with the idea of establishing the Center?
- Today in Russia the current situation led to the disappearance of scientific institutes of the cement industry. Our department has been engaged in this direction for more than 40 years. We cooperate with the factories, we conduct tests, we work on training personnel for the factories. The testing center of the cement industry operates at the department. We have cement testing equipment which meets its requirements according to Russian and European GOST. There is also a purposeful retraining of its personnel and retraining courses for third-party experts for industry. (recently our specialists have undergone training in Düsseldorf, in the leading university of the cement industry in Germany). On that basis, it was decided to formalize our activity.
- Which tasks are you going to solve?
- Since it is established at the university, its first task will be to train specialists for the cement industry at all levels: bachelor's, master's, postgraduate, doctoral studies, as well as training and retraining of specialists who already work at the enterprises.
Another task is heat engineering and technological audit of enterprises, audit of deposits, preliminary audit of projects of new plants under construction. This is the identification of "thin" places, the definition of the direction of modernization of the enterprise.
The third task is to participate in lawmaking. Now there is a return to GOSTs. The President and the government set the task to ensure that the products were competitive, which means that it must fully comply not only with domestic but also with foreign standards. The department takes an active part in the development of GOST for the production of technological regulations of production.
And the fourth is the preservation of energy resources. At the moment, energy and resource saving is very important in Russia and around the world. We are developing new processes and new compounds.
- What kind of employees will work at the Center?
- At the initial stage, the staff of the department will work here. To keep an extended staff, you need to have a large order book associated with a large amount of licensed work (you cannot quickly get a license for all types of work). It is very helpful that research work is included in the list of licensing of university development programs.
Once the work of the center is of interest to the production workers, then there is an expansion option, which would, of course, give a good result. For example, we carry out technological work - calculations, heat engineering, fuel combustion, aerodynamics, hydraulics, and for mechanical work a professional mechanic is needed. In order to take a complex order and execute it qualitatively, we will need to attract specialists.
- What problems do you face when launching the Center project?
-Time does not stand still and the technologies go ahead, so there is a need for the acquisition of modern equipment. For the last 8-10 years, with the huge support of the university, we have satisfied most of the needs for staffing the equipment. Now we are getting more advanced systems. We will continue to work in this direction.