Aleksey Gorozhankin, candidate of technical sciences, associate professor of the Electric Drive Department, won the competition Supporting Young Science last year, held at South Ural State University in 2016 as part of the 5-100 Project.
His work was dedicated to the research of electric drives for metallurgical manufacturing.
Electric drives for such a specific sphere of manufacturing as metallurgy are a unique project. They are characterized by the fact that each electric drive is, literally, a one-off product which is not mass-produced.
“A number of special requirements are placed on each electric drive. First of all, it must be highly reliable. If metallurgical manufacturing stops because of a malfunction in the electric drive, this stoppage brings large economic losses with it,” explains Aleksey Nikolaevich.
Electric drives for metallurgical manufacturing must also have a low prime cost and the best possible technical and operational characteristics. The design of such devices is only possible using supercomputer modeling and technologies of parallel computing.
SUSU researchers had the task of designing an electric drive that has high overload capacity, an extended range of speed regulation, is energy efficient, and met the requirements for high quality of electrical efficiency.
They developed and researched electric drives based on a synchronous reactive machine with independent control in the excitation channel. This machine differs from analogous machines in that they have special control laws which account for the work of the engine and transformer. Such an electric drive has already been installed in the “cold rolling” machine KhPT-450 of the Pilger mill at the Chelyabinsk Tube Rolling Plant.
This topic was not chosen by accident – in his postgraduate years, Aleksey Gorozhankin was interested in electric drives for metallurgic manufacturing. Orders began to come in from large metallurgical businesses and mechanical engineering companies.
“It is interesting that we do not ask factories to work with us, but rather they create their orders and come to us. This is all because electric drives power the technological processes of a business. The requirements for the electric drive depend on this process. Based on these requirements we begin to develop the drive and solve the tasks set,” says Aleksey Nikolaevich.
Today, 40 articles from Aleksey Gorozhankin have already been published in Russian and international publications included in the Scopus data base.
The researcher also has 14 patents and registrations for calculation programs on computing machines which allow for work with electric drives.
In two years, Aleksey Nikolaevich is planning on defending his doctoral dissertation in this area and increase his qualifications in this field of research.