On Wednesday, October 5, it became known that the St. Petersburg Mining University completed the assembly of a pilot delayed coking unit. Scientists will be able to use it to work on the technology of needle coke production, a material that has so far been purchased abroad. In the future it will allow to pass from laboratory experiments to its industrial production.
It is very difficult to overestimate the relevance of this event. The matter in question is not an ordinary innovation, but a real technological breakthrough, which will allow increasing profitability of domestic oil refining by times. The thing is that the average yield of light oil products at domestic refineries, gasoline in particular, does not exceed 70% today. This is an extremely low indicator. The more so because residues of primary processes - fuel oil and vacuum residue - are becoming less and less demanded by the market due to the toughening of ecological norms and rules.
Accordingly, the industry and scientists are faced with the cornerstone task of involving the maximum possible percentage of raw materials in processing and obtaining from it a high-margin end-use product. This is exactly what the unit built at the Mining University will make it possible to do. Its launch will make it possible to determine optimal properties of incoming raw materials, process parameters and equipment operation modes and, most importantly, to produce pilot batches of needle coke and other types of premium carbon materials.
"My colleagues and I offer a ready-made scientific and technical solution that makes it possible to produce needle coke whose quality corresponds to globally accepted standards. Moreover, the pilot unit designed and assembled at the Mining University is not inferior to analogs in profile foreign laboratories, such as Japanese ones," comments Vyacheslav Rudko, Executive Director of the Scientific Center "Problems of mineral and technogenic resources processing" at the St. Petersburg Mining University.
Petroleum needle coke is used in the space, chemical and metallurgical industries. For example, the electric arc steelmaking process requires graphite electrodes, which are consumed in the production process and consist 85% of needle coke. It is much more difficult to produce than ordinary coke, but it is worth the work in this case - it is about 20 times more expensive.
In the near future researchers will launch the first coking process on real industrial raw materials. Its volume can reach 200 liters per run.
"One of the most urgent tasks facing scientists at the Mining University is to test our technology in industry and obtain an opinion on the quality of the product. We are already working on the possibility of organizing large-scale production of needle coke using the original technology at one of the pilot sites of the Mining University. In addition, we are ready to supply our product to our main consumers - manufacturers of graphitized electrodes for electric steel and accumulator batteries," says Vyacheslav Rudko.
In his opinion, this project was made possible thanks to the initiative of Rector Vladimir Litvinenko, who last year separated the educational process and research activities by creating six research centers. Under each department, of course, well-equipped laboratories remained, where students are still engaged, as before. However, the most valuable equipment was given to the leading scientists, who can now avoid worrying that the equipment they need will be taken up by students at the most inopportune moment. This has already brought an obvious result: the time needed for research at the university has been significantly reduced.