On Monday, November
14, 2022, a guest lecture from industry was held as part of the course
"Modeling in Process Industry" for students in the 1st year of the IAM
engineering study. The guest lecturers were FCHPT graduates, Ing. Réka Lőrincz (Eng. study at CHI) and Ing. Milan Horňák (Eng. studies at IAM) from Slovnaft, a.s. The topic of the lecture was the work at Slovnaft, a.s., examples of digitization, simulation models and examples from practice.
Students presented the current progress of the Project on Process Control at the mid-term project meeting. Each team presented solved tasks and listed the remaining issues to be addressed. Among other goals, the students designed and 3D-modelled an improved irrigation system running on a separate microcontroller. Students also installed new sensors to monitor the environment in the smart greenhouse and reviewed the code of autonomous control to make it even more efficient and modular. The user interface of the remote control was also improved.
The FrontSeat project (Fostering Opportunities Towards Slovak Excellence in Advanced Control for Smart Industries), which received support under the Horizon Europe program, has completed its Kick-off Project Meeting. It is an important milestone within the project, in which STU acts as a coordinator.
Ing. Martin Mojto participated in the conference Advanced Process Modelling Forum (APMF) on October 18-19, 2022, in London. The event was organized by the branch of the SIEMENS company, SIEMENS Process System Engineering (SPSE). Martin successfully presented a poster "Multi-Model Soft-Sensor Design for a Depropanizer Distillation Column", where he summarized the results of his work in cooperation with the company Slovnaft, a.s.
On Tuesday, October 25, 2pm CEST, a scientific seminar will be held in the series "Research Seminar on Smart Cybernetics". Mikael Kurula from Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland will give a talk entitled "Explicit model predictive control for PDEs".
On October 18, we organized a scientific seminar on "Modeling and optimization of low-pressure gas-carburizing furnaces". The scientific seminar was lead led by Fatima Matamoros, a PhD student at the Reactions and Chemical Engineering Laboratory, National Center for Scientific Research / Université de Lorraine, Nancy, France, supervised by Prof. Abderrazak M. Latifi. The scientific seminar was organised in the framework of the FrontSeat project, as part of the seminar series on "Research Seminar on Smart Cybernetics".
Thousands of visitors to the European Night of Researchers enjoyed the practical experiments of automation and process control at our IAM stand. We are thankful for the high interest in our stand, where the visitors could enjoy remote control of our smart greenhouse VESNA using the cloud service. Visitors could learn the basic principles of feedback control by controlling the height at which a 3D printed object levitates by the flow of flowing air in the FlexyAir device.
This Student Contest Problem (SCP) is organized by the European Committee for the Use of Computers in Chemical Engineering Education (EURECHA), with the support of the CAPE Working Party and the Energy section of the European Federation of Chemical Engineering. The contest problem is open to Bachelor/Master/PhD level students. The participants have a few months to prepare and submit solutions to an open problem that involves Energy and Chemical Engineering, while using tools of Computer Aided Chemical Engineering. The deadline for submission is April 15 2023, 23:59 CET. Solutions can be prepared by individuals or by teams.
As part of the big national event The Scientific Show, hundreds of visitors visited also the IAM stand, where they learned more about automation and process control in the chemical and food industry. As part of this event, we also presented the prototype of our smart greenhouse VESNA, which we are developing together with our students.
On September 11-14, 2022, we presented our scientific results at International Conference - Cybernetics & Informatics in Visegrád, Hungary.