Tag: Tomsk Polytechnic University

The Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation (also known as the Charitable Foundation for Cultural Initiatives) has summed up the New Role of Libraries in Education competition. A Tomsk project for international students entitled Tomsk: View from Other Side of Earth received the support of the Foundation. The project will be implemented in partnership with Tomsk Polytechnic University and the Tomsk Regional Museum of Local Lore.

Experts of three TPU divisions: the Museum Complex, the Science and Technical Library, and the International Students Office are working on this project. The project starts from September 2021, a beginning of a new study year.

“At TPU, there will be formed groups of international students for which we jointly with colleagues are developing a program of social and cultural, adaptation events based on our Museums, Library and the Tomsk Regional Museum of Local Lore. We are planning to involve the urban museum community in the process of cultural adaptation and integration on the regular basis. In order international students will be able to become familiar with the city and region where they are going to study for a few years,” Lidiia Lozovaya, Director of the TPU Museum Complex, says.

The event program includes excursions, discussion sessions and exhibitions. The organizers hope that the project will help international students to faster become accustomed to a new city and become involved in the cultural life of the university and Tomsk.

Tomsk Polytechnic University launched a massive open online course (MOOC) entitled Introduction to Petroleum Engineering on Coursera, an American massive open online course provider. Over 4,200 attendees from all over the world have already passed the course.

Introduction to Petroleum Engineering was launched in January 2021. The course materials are provided in English, open and free for studying. Since the moment of its launch, over 4,200 students from India, the USA, Nigeria, Iraq and other countries have submitted their applications for the course. Monthly about 700 people sign up for the course. Most of the attendees are Indian residents: 30 percent of the overall students are Indian citizens.

“Coursera allows not only obtaining expertise but also gives opportunities to be involved in the communication with the community and course instructors, with each other. It helps to establish professional communication and share experience in the extractive industry,”  Yuliya Barabanova, Leading Manager of the TPU Office of Digital Education Resources, assures.

Introduction to Petroleum Engineering is aimed at attendees interested in the extraction of petroleum and gas. Taking the course, students will be able to form an idea on the overall process of development and exploitation of fields from the theory fundamentals to the demonstration of design of operating facilities of the petroleum industry.

Passing the course is flexible: Coursera fixes approximate dates of assignments, which every attendee can change.

“The TPU experts developed a course in a way that attendees could receive qualitative and engrossing material, tasks would be diverse and course support by the management team would be on time. This method bore its fruits: 79 percent of whose left feedback was the highest mark. They characterized the course as well-balanced, engrossing and educational,” Yuliya adds.

Tomsk Polytechnic University has concluded a unique contract to implement a retraining program entitled Master of Business Administration with the speciality in Management in Uranium Mining. Senior managers of Kazakhstan enterprises of the uranium mining industry, they are 47 enterprises, will be able to join the retraining program.

Annually, there will be enrolled one group of students. Retraining will last for two years. A curriculum of the program consists of eight modules aimed at the development of professional expertise of senior managers of enterprises of the uranium mining industry in the conditions of an invariant market environment.

“The unique feature of the retraining program lies in the involvement of the MBA Programs Office of the TPU Center for Сontinuing Education, the academic staff of the TPU School of Nuclear Science and Engineering, and the Division for Geology of the TPU School of Earth Sciences and Engineering,” Galina Alekhina, Director of the MBA Programs Office of TPU, says.

“To implement the retraining program, leading educators of TPU, as well as experts of Tomsk and Moscow universities were involved in the number of subjects.”

The students will study enterprise and team management, including economics, management, project and staff management, internal communications, lean manufacturing and the theory of inventive problem-solving. The module of special subjects related to the specific characters of work of a uranium mining enterprise is planned as well.

The students jointly with the experts will analyze cases on uranium extraction technology and nuclear fuel, radiochemistry, methods of analytical control of uranium mining production, logistics of the uranium mining industry and study many other aspects.

The program will be implemented in a hybrid mode. Most of the classes will be held in Kazakhstan. One of the modules, a production one, will be given in Tomsk, at TPU.

Scientists of Tomsk Polytechnic University have developed a method to reduce refinery energy consumption. Using this method, the scientists were able to save more than half of the fuel at the researched manufacturing site.

The university experts believe that these results can be achieved at almost any industrial manufacturing facility. The research findings are published in the Energy Conversion and Management academic journal (IF: 9,709; Q1). Journalists of the Sputnik international news agency told more about the conducted research.

The scientists used hydrocracking, the processing of high-boiling oil fractions to generate fuel at the refinery. They proposed to reduce the spending of energy resources using the optimization of a structure of technological and heat fluxes. The specific sequence of heat exchangers led to increased energy efficiency. As a result, the consumption of fuel gas and heavy fuel oil was reduced by 54 percent, while the consumption of electrical energy was reduced by 20 percent at the refinery.

“For instance, there are three heat fluxes. The first flux is heated by steam, the second one is cooled by water and the third is heated in the oven. To save energy resources, we can heat the first and third fluxes by the second one. There are dozens of such fluxes at any operating refinery,” Stanislav Boldyrev, Research Fellow of the TPU Research School of Chemistry and Applied Biomedical Sciences, said.

According to the researcher, the proposed method can be used both for the renewal of operating enterprises of the secondary sector of the economy and for designing new more energy-efficient manufacturing facilities with a minimal impact on the environment. Such renewal will allow refineries to reduce costs for manufacturing final products and to reduce the environmental impact.

Fuel-saving at the refinery where the experiment was conducted led to the reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 19 t per year. It is linked with the overall reduction of burning fuel.

“This technology can already be used for improving processes in chemical and gas processing industries, food handling. The technology can be used everywhere where raw materials are used and it deals with heating, cooling and chemical transformations,” Stanislav Boldyrev notes.

To create an optimal flux structure, the researchers used pinch technology, integration principles of seamless process flows, graph theory and fundamentals of heat and mass transfer.

Fuel saving at the refinery where the experiment was conducted led to the reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 19 t per year. It is linked with the overall reduction of burning fuel.

“Pinch technology lies in minimizing gross energy in any system where there are fluxes which must be heated and cooled. Using these fluxes, it is possible to recuperate thermal energy, i.e. to use this energy one more time. In its turn, graph theory allowed optimizing the structure and forming a mathematical task,” the scientist added

“The graph theory helped to reduce the number of required heat exchangers, i.e. to select a structure of a heat exchanger network, in which there will be two heat exchangers instead of ten additional ones. Thus, it is possible to reduce capital expenses for manufacturing renewal.”

Experts of Tomsk Polytechnic University have presented to the participants of the ENTER project co-funded by the Erasmus + Programme of the European Union trial’s results of a new iPET-1 professional development programme for engineering educators. The meeting was held at Vyatka State University located in Kirov.

The system for pedagogical training is the main objective of the ENTER project aiming at forming the next generation of educators in engineering, technology and technical sciences using modular classes.

The project proposes a hierarchy of three structured educational programmes meeting the requirements of the European Qualifications Framework for Lifelong Learning: iPET-1 Short-Focused (e.g. 2 ECTS), “Qualification Development” Certificate; iPET-2 Professional Retraining (e.g. 8 ECTS), Diploma “Higher Education Teacher” and iPET-3 International Recognized (e.g. 20 ECTS), a full programme leading to international accreditation as “Engineering Educator”.

“In the project, TPU is in charge of a work package for designing professional development programmes. Within the ENTER Consortium jointly with colleagues, we were able to design multi-level modular programmes mastering which attendees will receive an international Professional Retraining Certificate and further will be able to submit an application for a European Professional Certification,” Olga Ponomareva, Associate Professor of the TPU Research Center for Management and Technologies in Higher Education, explains.

The TPU experts presented the trial’s results of the iPET-1 programme at the university. This programme is aimed at developing pedagogical competences and skills of innovations in engineering pedagogy, time management and effective communication. In total, 19 educators of TPU took part in the trial. Moreover, the TPU educators presented a summary analysis of the trial’s results of the iPET programmes at all partner universities of the Consortium.

“The participants of the ENTER project highly accessed the implementation level of iPET-1 at TPU and became interested in a class procedure on time management that is held by Alyona Khaperskaya,” Olga Ponomareva adds.

Within the meeting in Kirov, there was concluded a framework agreement on creating the ENTER network. This agreement will allow expanding the activity on implementation of the pedagogical training and creating the accreditation system of professional development and certification programmes for engineering educators in the ENTER catalogue.

Since autumn 2021, TPU is intending to launch the iPET-1, iPET-2, iPET-3 professional development and retraining programmes. University educators can complete training for these programmes for free.  Then, in spring 2022, there will be held an international accreditation of the iPET programmes at TPU. The attendees who successfully complete the training will obtain an international certificate as an engineering educators.