Within SUSU’s strategic direction entitled “Fundamental science in the sphere of providing Engineering 3.0”, an interdisciplinary project team of the university’s scientists in a record-breaking period of time (6 weeks) created Kinetic Calculation software product, which allows studying kinetics of chemical processes.
Vyacheslav Avdin, Doctor of Sciences (Chemistry), Dean of the Institute of Natural Sciences and Mathematics’ Faculty of Chemistry, told us about relevance of the invention:
“Many substances and objects that we use in everyday life get destructed in due time under the impact of air or water. Our goal is to find out, how long an object can serve at room temperature or the temperature of exploitation. For many materials, this period of time amounts decades and, of course, we can’t conduct such an experiment in real time. Therefore, we needed a special software product in order to study the fracture kinetics at various temperatures. In the future, the obtained data will allow calculating the fracture kinetics at room or other necessary temperature.”
Specificity of this project is the fact that work of the interdisciplinary team was carried out with the use of Scrum methodology.
“Scrum is a project management methodology, on the basis of which a development process gets elaborated, allowing for innovative product development in strictly determined and short periods of teamwork time, called sprints. Using this methodology sufficiently improves work efficiency,” says Dmitry Drozin, the person responsible for the Fundamental science in the sphere of providing Engineering 3.0 strategic direction, and one of the interdisciplinary team members.
The developed Kinetic Calculation program allows conducting research in the sphere of a substance’s fracture kinetics, and is distinguishable from the existing analogs around world by its more accurate computational algorithm and a special function of researching the fracture process. Besides, the existing programs only use one research method, whereas Kinetic Calculation implements three methods at a time: the Vyazovkin method, the Ozawa-Flynn-Wall method, and the Friedman method.
One of the main research areas of SUSU’s Nanotechnology REC is obtaining photocatalysts for fracture of organic substances, resistant to oxidation. Using this software, the scientists are planning on significant enhancement of exploitation properties of such photocatalysts.
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In the picture: a photocatalyst
Presently, the team of scientists including the SCRUM master Natalia Krupina, the “product owner” Tatiana Krupnova, a physicist and programmer Dmitry Drozin, a mathematician Natalia Ivanova, and a programmer Tatiana Olenchikova, is preparing an article to get published in a scientific journal. The article will provide detailed description of the calculation algorithm by the example of decomposition of , using the Kinetic calculation program. Moreover, sponsor of the software product, Vyacheslav Avdin, is also planning on publishing the research results in top-rated scientific journals.
Nowadays, the scientists are receiving a certificate on the software registration and documenting a free license. Upon conditions of such license, a user can freely use Kinetic calculation for one’s research, provided citation of the invention authors in one’s scientific papers.