At the final stage of the All-Russian Student Olympiad “Advanced Technologies in Energy Saving”, held from 12 to 15 December, the SPbGASU team took first place in the practical part.

The Olympiad was held remotely by the Kazan State Energy University. SPbGASU was represented by fourth-year bachelor's students of the Faculty of Environmental Engineering and Municipal Services: Glafira Bachmanova and Egor Zverev, majoring in “Electrical power engineering and electrical engineering”, and Georgy Ilyinsky and Gleb Gorev, majoring in “Thermal power engineering and heating engineering”. The team leader was Associate Professor at the Department of Structural Physics, Power Engineering and Electrical Engineering Aleksandr Epishkin.

The team developed a case study to improve the energy efficiency of a five-story building of the 1-355 series (built 1958–1966) for the climatic conditions of their region. Houses of this series are common in St Petersburg, and are also found in Cherepovets, Ulyanovsk, Volgograd, Moscow.

The students identified a list of possible engineering solutions, carried out a feasibility study, identified project risks and measures to prevent them, and developed proposals for obtaining funding.

Among the proposals of the SPbGASU team are: replacing incandescent lamps with more economical LED lamps; use of an automated commercial electricity metering system (ACEMS); installation of individual gas meters and at least the simplest gas leak alarm system, and ideally a gas analyzer; two-pipe heating system; insulation of basement pipelines to reduce heat loss; ventilated facade to improve the energy efficiency of the structure; installation of a weather station on the roof of a building.

“We connect the meteorological station to the local boiler house (if there is one), and with the help of automation the required amount of heat will be supplied to the houses, which will significantly reduce the excess energy for heating the coolant during the transition period,” explained Gleb Gorev.

“In the long term, a weather station is an incredibly effective method that does not require constant monitoring. To work, it is necessary to correctly configure the system parameters and software, and also provide for the transition to stable operation of the system due to an emergency shutdown of the station,” believes Georgy Ilyinsky.

“Last year and the year before, SPbGASU teams won second places in this competition. This year, 18 teams competed, including from capital and federal universities, and the students who made up our team participated in such an Olympiad for the first time. Nevertheless, their work turned out to be the most voluminous and simply the best. I realized that our team is on the approaches to the top when I checked the cases of all the teams. And the subsequent defense went wonderfully, the team showed the maximum possible results,” said Aleksandr Epishkin.