ASU Strengthens Cooperation with Southern Shipbuilding & Shiprepairing Centre

A strategic session on drafting a joint-action plan within the Strategic Academic Leadership Programme, which is being developed these days, for the period until 2024 and the planning horizon until 2030 took place on September, 24 at the training facility of the Southern Shipbuilding & Shiprepairing Centre.

The meeting between ASU and the Southern Shipbuilding & Shiprepairing Centre was another step in cooperation between the organizations according to the agreement, signed this August.

The meeting participants were to address the following tasks:

• to identify “gaps” in the current state of the university and needs of the shipbuilding industry;
• to draft top-priority scientific projects for their inclusion into the programme portfolio.

According to Head of the Engineering Project Office of Astrakhan State University Aleksey Titov, the meeting will kick start to extensive work of the two teams.

For example, experts of the enterprise voiced their approval of proposals, put forward by ASU researchers Aleksey Rybakov, Radmir Rzaev and Vladimir Smirnov, on three R&D initiative projects:

• robotic underwater welding;
• hull and hull structures welding by a robotic manipulator;
• friction stir welding of ship structures (steel/aluminium).

The centre’s specialists expressed their readiness to take direct part in these initiatives and help implement them.

In their turn, ASU received a few counterproposals from the centre on implementing joint projects. In particular, the Process Factory is meant for introducing the lean production technology into structural units of the enterprise.