SUSU has presented its “road map” for “5-100”, the project for increasing the competitiveness for Russian universities among leading international scientific and educational centers. Among the breakthrough areas are fields such as supercomputer modeling, research of the mechanisms of stress, and defense against asteroids, and ecological preservation.
Today, the disruption of ecological balance is a global issue for humanity. Researchers at SUSU have been working in this field for more than one year. Their research can be definitively named successful and able to solve one of the most urgent ecological problems.
For a long time, without a doubt, the activities of industrial facilities have been proven to have a tangible, negative impact on the ecosystem, in part on soil and water quality. Extracting metals from ores causes serious damage to the hydro- and lithosphere. For example, this problem is especially serious in Karabash, where, during the production of copper a large quantity of substances were released, including lead, arsenic, sulfur, and copper itself. We want to point out that these substances accumulate in human and animal systems. As a result, the city faced a serious ecological problem: serious pollution of the air and soil, as well as rivers, reservoirs, and groundwater.
Sorbent, created in SUSU, is a substance cable of absorbing radioactive emissions and the harmful impacts of heavy metals, turning them into so-called inert minerals, which are not dangerous for the surrounding environment and can be in water, for example, in any amount of time like an ordinary river rock. Sorbent allows for the disinfection of both water and soil, and was successfully demonstrated in experimental settings within a laboratory, as well as in a few real-life sites.
«At this time, we have practically developed the basic components which will be used within sorbent. We have determined another property of this sorbent – it is possible to make it so that it doesn’t sink in water. This allows us to remove the oily film on the surface of reservoirs,” says Gennady Mikhailov, PhD in technical sciences, dean of the SUSU faculty of Physics and Metallurgy, head of the department of physical chemistry,
«We already have some small successes. One day, we had to lower the alpha radiation level in a source located in the village of Smolino. We applied our creation. Sorbent instantly absorbed the trace amounts of radioactive materials. Also, we have removed pollution from several Magnitogorsk wells, where substances were detected in the water, in part a large quantity of iron cations.”
One more incontrovertible plus of this creation is its low cost:
«The Magnezit factory, which interested us in relation to waste products, has components which could be used to form the basis of sorbent. In this way, production of sorbent becomes absolutely inexpensive. We are always working and changing the contents slightly to achieve greater capacity and stability…”
According to the words of Gennady Georgevich, the main goal at this time is creating laboratory and industrial locations for the manufacture of small batches of sorbet (a few tons). This will allow the researchers to conduct natural experiments on sorbent in various conditions: summer and winter time, in the air, and so on. There are plans to utilize sorbent in Karabash and thereby block the harmful flow which comes from the surrounding mountains and sludge fields from the territory of the Argazi water reservoir.
The following equally significant creations for nature preservation are being worked upon by the SUSU faculty of chemistry:
The development of alternative energy sources is a promising field capable of significantly reducing dependence upon non-renewable resources and decreasing atmospheric pollution:
«As head of the faculty of ecology, I am often asked about the negative effects of factory emissions on the atmosphere. Although motor transport is responsible for about 50% of the pollution in major cities! Of course, depending on the city, this figure oscillates in the range of 40-65%. It needs to be considered that factories are located on the edges of the city and downwind, unlike cars which are located uniformly throughout the city. Therefore, alternatives to oil will be a significant ecological improvement!” says doctor of chemical sciences, dean of the faculty of chemistry, professor Vyacheslav Advin.
Researchers are working on the creation of new-generation solar batteries. For this, SUSU along with the Institute of Organic Chemistry (Moscow) is synthesizing new photosensitizers, which were earlier unobtainable.
One of the key moments of this difficult work is replacing the element sulfur with the element selenium:
«This reaction allowed us to increase photosensitizer efficiency an estimated 3 times. In reality, this figure may change, for example 2.5 times or even 4 times. However, even with an efficiency growth of just 2 times, the improvements are significant! Now, the existing elements provide electricity to buildings only in regions with a lot of light, for example in the southern regions. The new photosensitizers will be able to be used, for example, in our low-light regions,” comments Vyacheslav Viktorovich.
The photosensitizers themselves are just the foundation of the developments. For successful production, researchers must think up a whole range of products from which it will be possible to manufacture an improved solar cell. According to the words of Vyacheslav Advin, this area recruits the capabilities of colleagues from Scotland and the United Kingdom, who are already interested in this creation.
The key feature of the new kind of solar cells will be their plasticity. As planned by the scientists, it will be possible to give them any shape, which means easy application to any object according to its characteristics, shape, and design. It will be possible to “wrap” ballpoint pens or full buildings in photosensitive matrix.
The introduction of this type of energy will be inexpensive, and at this time there are no existing analogs.
The second area of work relates to structured catalysts based on metal oxide compounds:
“We developed catalysts of this type several years ago, and we have some definite successes. Not long ago, we determined that this kind of catalyst is used in hydrogen energy. That is, the electrolysis process of water with the creation of hydrogen,” says Vyacheslav Advin.
The idea is that these developments will significantly lower expenses and the final cost of the produced hydrogen in comparison to the traditional method, were the production of hydrogen turned out to be so expensive, that its use for generating energy was unpractical.
According to preliminary estimates, an existing prototype of these catalysts in America turned out to be 10 times less costly.
By the words of Vyacheslav Viktorovich, synthesizing the catalysts themselves was not a difficult process for our scientists. However, it is now necessary to receive the electrochemical cell and evaluate the efficiency of this reaction.