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Ivan Tkachenko, Director of the Advanced Aerospace Engineering School, informed the head of the region that there 250 students at the AAES today. The training is conducted under 14 educational programs and is organized according to the two-level principle: the first level is two senior bachelor’s degree courses, the second one is two master’s degree courses.
“In 2024, we will have the first graduation – 75 engineers of the new formation will come to enterprises. All the AAES graduates have been “booked” by employers, and over 50 of the graduates have been already employed”, specified Ivan Tkachenko.
He explained that the Advanced Aerospace Engineering School is based on the digital-factory concept developed at Samara University. Here, integrated technologies combining digital services with real production processes, which allows speeding them up and ensuring flexibility and high performance in production, are developed here.
All the AAES developments are focused on mass production of high-tech products, such as spacecrafts, small-sized gas-turbine engines, unmanned aviation systems, and aircrafts for regional airlines.
For mastering digital technologies, 14 new educational spaces have been arranged at the AAES. Some of them are localized in one educational building, they were demonstrated to the Governor Dmitry Azarov.
The head of the region began his acquaintance with the AAES with visiting the interactive complex of advanced training of engineering personnel, based on modern VR technologies, which was opened at the end of 2022.
Sergey Vlasov, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Aircraft Construction and Design, and Ilya Leykovsky, Head of the Interactive Advanced Engineering-Personnel Training Complex “Immersive Technologies in Propulsion Engineering”, showed Dmitry Azarov how virtual (VR) and augmented (AR) reality technologies are used for training specialists in digital transformation of aerospace engineering production. Together with the AAES students, they demonstrated assembly processes in the virtual environment, using the example of an aircraft engine and landing gear.
In the Interactive Advanced Engineering-Personnel Training Complex “Digital Additive Technologies”, the head of the region got acquainted with the process of teaching the AAES students to design digital models of parts and obtain finished products by 3D printing.
Examining the equipment that the Complex is furnished with, Dmitry Azarov asked what kind of product is formed by the 3D printer working next to him. Ilya Markanov, Researcher and Laboratory Assistant at the Engineering Centre, as well as a first-year graduate student at the AAES, answered that it is a real melting model to be printed out, using which a part of the small-sized gas-turbine engine will later be cast.
Ivan Tkachenko demonstrated to Dmitry Azarov the plastic prototype of the optical-system housing for the 12U cubesat for the Earth remote sensing. After working out the design and the technological process, the sample of the housing will be made in metal. This complex detail is intended for satellites, the pilot production of which is now being organized in partnership with the Rocket-Space Centre “Progress” at the cyber-physical factory of small spacecrafts, part of the AAES structure.
Ivan Tkachenko drew Dmitry Azarov’s attention to the key difference in organization of the educational process at Samara University from that at advanced engineering schools of other universities participating in the federal project.
“One of the unique features to have been implemented, which distinguishes our Advanced Aerospace Engineering School, is teamwork”, emphasized Ivan Tkachenko. “We want to develop this experience so that the AAES of Samara University trained not individual specialists, but ready-made multidisciplinary teams”.
Ilya Markanov confirmed that the students to be currently in the classroom are a single team and solve an end-to-end learning task.
“Among us, there are designers, technologists and production organizers, and during our studies we act in different positions, replacing each other. This allows developing and controlling all stages of the production process from the start of designing to manufacturing the part, using equipment, which the interactive complex is furnished with”, he explained.
According to Ivan Tkachenko, training multidisciplinary teams of specialists at the Advanced Aerospace Engineering School is a federal-level idea. The main difficulty in its implementation is to change production workers’ minds, convince industrial partners to accept and employ such teams.
“This is an interesting idea and interesting experience. It is necessary to form and conduct such teams through production enterprises. Let’s separately discuss this issue with employers”, supported the idea the Governor Dmitry Azarov.
The head of the region got acquainted with the Interactive Advanced Engineering-Personnel Training Complex “Robotics and Mechatronics” based on modern digital technologies. Maksim Blokhin, Head of the Complex, told him that in the organized educational space, students design and explore control systems for drives, mechanisms and robotic systems, study methods for identifying static and dynamic parameters of mechatronic systems, learn to apply machine learning methods to realize robot movement.
Dmitry Azarov also visited the Laboratory of the Industrial Internet of Things, established due to the initiative of Viktor Soyfer, Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, President of Samara University. Here applied research of principles of building typical network architectures, wired and wireless interfaces are conducted, and principles of building cloud platforms for monitoring and production management are studied. In particular, the AAES specialists currently model the production line for their industrial partner, “UEC – Kuznetsov” PJSC.
At the end of the tour, the Governor was shown the supercomputer “Sergey Korolev”. Its hardware platform consists of IBM BladeCenter using blade servers, the computing complex has a peak performance of 40 trillion floating-point operations per second (40 TFlops).
Ivan Zubrilin, Director of the Engineering Center, specializes in computer modeling of processes in engines and power facilities. He told Dmitry Azarov that the supercomputer constantly runs at full load. This supercomputer allows scientists of Samara University to implement large-scale projects involving big amounts of computing.
In particular, it was used for calculating in course of designing the gas generator for a promising gas-turbine aircraft engine with the thrust of 24 tons, for “UEC – Kuznetsov” PJSC, as well as small-sized gas-turbine engines and power facilities to be developed at the University.
Dmitry Azarov thanked the scientists for their work and expressed his confidence that by working together, “we will more and more confirm the status of the Samara Region as the country’s key region in developing science, education, technology and industry”.
Photo: Olesya Orina
