The South African city of Gkeberha hosted the Young Scientists Forum, which included the sixth BRICS Young Innovators Competition. A total of 20 applicants from five countries - Russia, China, Brazil, South Africa and India - were selected to take part in the intellectual competition. One of them was Alexandra Buldysko, a postgraduate student of the St. Petersburg Mining University of Empress Catherine II.
This competition is aimed at identifying the strongest research and innovation projects that will make a significant contribution to the development of world science and economy, as well as attracting as many young scientists as possible to international scientific and technical co-operation. This year's competition theme was presented in four areas: modernisation of production, modernisation of agriculture, modernisation of the mining industry and circular economy (economy based on resource renewal).
Alexandra Buldysko's project is an integrated platform for managing the energy efficiency of equipment for enterprises in the fuel and energy and mineral resource complexes. It is a set of interconnected services providing energy optimisation services for companies. It was worked on by the team of the Training and Research Centre for Digital Technologies at the Mining University.
"I developed a service for monitoring and diagnostics of equipment, which is part of the platform. It is based on a scientific idea to improve the approach to determining the presence of equipment defects during operation. The classical method of fault finding is to analyse vibration signals, while I propose to use the decomposition of current signals, as, from our point of view, they can be more informative if you learn to study and understand them. We are already talking about deeper layers of signal analysis - machine learning methods and artificial intelligence," Alexandra Buldysko said.
The service created by the St. Petersburg graduate student allows detecting equipment defects at an earlier stage of their development, which was confirmed in the course of approbation in the university's laboratories. In addition, the Mining University signed an agreement with BELAZ to create a new laboratory where the platform will be tested on the Belarusian company's engines with the prospect of further implementation of the technology.
The developed platform, through competent management of the repair maintenance plan, will allow companies to reduce the total life cycle cost of engine operation by at least 7 per cent and cut energy consumption by 5 per cent.
"Despite the fact that I did not win with my project, it is a great honour to be among the 20 strongest young scientists of the BRICS countries and to be able to represent my country in such a high-level competition. Participation has given me a clear understanding that even with the most effective work it is always possible to work even better, as well as what exactly needs to be done to develop and scale up the project," said Alexandra Buldysko.
The peculiarity of the competition is the fact that all submitted projects must have a high potential for commercial realisation or have already been brought to the market.
