The official opening of the Ecoanalytics Centre took place at South Ural State University on December 15th. The centre has been created under the Priority 2030 program with the support from the Government of the Chelyabinsk Region. Alexey Texler, Governor of the Chelyabinsk Region, and his First Deputy Irina Gekht were present at the opening ceremony.
New laboratories of the centre are located on the fifth floor of the Chemistry department building of SUSU; it also includes a mobile laboratory (automobile). All of them are fully fitted with Russian equipment (chromatographs, gas analysers) that allow diagnosing environmental pollution of water and atmosphere.
The functionality of this centre is unique for our region. The equipment will allow not only to diagnose the state of the environment, but also to test technologies for its conservation. The "collectivity" of the centre means that not only SUSU students and scientists, but also representatives of regional industry will be able to use the results of its research. Some companies are already setting tasks for the centre’s experts: for example, the Tekhno plant proposed to develop a technology to clean water from phenol impurities using photocatalysis. While conducting experiments, SUSU scientists have managed to reduce the concentration of phenol impurities by a thousand times.
Governor of the Chelyabinsk Region Alexey Texler highlighted the importance of issues on which the centre is working. He also visited the Electrochemistry Research Laboratory, which also deals with issues of ecology, as part of the mega-grant from the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation.
The Governor asked young scientists and students, who are working in the laboratories, about their future plans and encouraged them to remain working at enterprises of our region.
“Thanks to your support, we will now be able to conduct research on the state of the environment at a deeper fundamental level,” SUSU Rector Alexander Wagner thanked the Governor.