April 7 was the finale of the "Steps" contest for Gazprom class students, presenting their reports in a number of sections.
The theme of the 2024 competition is "Engineering Thought - Energy of the Future", which includes five sections: "Engineering Solutions in Oil and Gas Industry"; "Chemical Technologies"; "Digital Economy, Social Technology Management"; "Technosphere Environmental Safety (in oil and gas industry)"; "Energy Saving and Alternative Energy".
The projects were rated based on several criteria, including relevance, practical significance, presence of a research part, depth of conclusions, personal contribution to the research, as well as the level of proficiency in the subject matter and culture of speech.
School students from two Gazpromclasses are studying at Polytech: State Budgetary Educational Institution Gymnasium No. 330 of Nevsky District of St. Petersburg and State Budgetary Educational Institution Gymnasium No. 426 of Petrodvortsovy District of St. Petersburg named after Hero of the Soviet Union G. D. Kostylev. During six months, from October to April, the children acquired teamwork skills and engaged in project activities at the Polytechnic University together with supervisors who are students and employees of the Graduate School of Power Engineering of the Institute of Energy supervised by Arseniy Klyuev, assistant of the Graduate School of Power Engineering.
In 2024, 5 teams passed to the stage of project defense at the Steps competition in two sections with the following project topics:
Oil and Gas Engineering Solutions Section:
Advanced digital technologies to improve the efficiency of processes in the oil and gas industry;
Development of commercial helium production technology by extraction of target components from natural gas;
Use of digital twin technology at fuel and energy facilities.
Section "Energy Saving and Alternative Energy":
Development of autonomous power supply system for gas pipeline telemechanics control point based on renewable energy sources;
Increasing the efficiency of hydraulic turbine operation by methods of computational hydrodynamics.
The team from Gymnasium 426 consisting of Tigran Mikayelyan and Dmitry Dementev were awarded the Diploma of the II degree for participation in the competition with the project "Increasing the efficiency of a hydraulic turbine by methods of computational fluid dynamics", as a result of the project realization the students managed to increase the efficiency of an orthogonal hydraulic turbine by 8%.
In the final part, before summarizing the results, Alexey Yablokov, senior lecturer of HSPE IE, addressed the schoolchildren. He prepared a popular science lecture "Energy machines as the bases of energy generation and conversion". You can follow the recording of this lecture, as well as the realization of the contest, in the telegram channel of the contest "Steps": t.me/stupenigazprom.
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