ST. PETERSBURG, May 18. /TASS/. The Marine Valley scientific and technological center, which will focus on technologies for development of the Arctic shelf, will be organized at the St. Petersburg State Marine Technical University (SMTU). In compliance with the Russian president’s order, the university will file necessary paperwork with the government in September, the University’s President Gleb Turchin told TASS.
"The Russian president has issued an order to organize the Marine Valley Center in Primorsk, the Leningrad Region, at SMTU’s base," the university’s head said. "We must file an application in September, 2021, and we have been working on the papers."
According to him, the university received the Primorsk base in the Leningrad Region about 40 years earlier. It is some 120 km from St. Petersburg. It had been used for energy studies and ship trials. The plot, owned by the university, is about 12 hectares. The center will comprise a chain of directions from electronic components for testing equipment to use of modern Russian equipment and technology complexes to be used in production of natural resources on the shelf, he added.
"Such complexes require many items of adjacent infrastructures: equipment and systems to manage and control processes, underwater works, to see everything happening in the water, or to have robots with manipulators to carry out certain works," he continued. "Those robots will require special devices for communication and navigation, and another aspect is facilities to charge the robots."
"Additionally, we will need special areas to test all that equipment - the extraction equipment and the service equipment," he said. "Those are the items and systems we must make."
Center’s clusters
Companies in the Marine Valley will be working in four main clusters. The first one will focus on the element base for electronics and optic electronics, without which making equipment will be impossible. The second cluster - instrument-making; there companies will develop systems, installations, robots for direct work on the shelf. The third cluster is a large-scale test site for various developments before those are sent to clients.
"Another cluster, which we must have, is educational. So that, on one hand, to train specialists at our university, and, on the other hand, to teach personnel of resource companies how to use new equipment," the rector said. "Thus, the center will need a building for classes and a hotel. By making these four clusters, we will have everything necessary for the sector - from components to clients."
However, he continued, not all facilities of the Marine Valley Center will be located in Primorsk. For example the university will organize a techno park next to one of its buildings in St. Petersburg’s Kirovsky District. The techno park will host small unions of researchers and designers, university labs and private companies. Production facilities will be in Primorsk - the town will offer incentives; while prototype design will remain close to the university for convenience of the research process.
"Our techno park will focus on the Center’s technology chains: mostly electronics and optic electronics, and instruments - to a less degree," Turichin said. "Besides, we want to focus on companies, which have remained in St. Petersburg after the collapse of the soviet-time big enterprises, which used to work in the sector of electronics."
"We want to bring them together so that in the framework of this techno park to stop the degradation of the country’s electronic components sector," he said. "This would be another very important objective."
More than 30 Russian companies have expressed interest in joining the Center - including Gazprom, Gazprom Neft, Oceanpribor, Avrora, Electron, and a few small innovative companies. The Center will also attract several universities: the St. Petersburg Electrotechnical University (LETI), the Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University, the Southern Federal University (Rostov-On-Don), etc. The Center will offer more than 1,000 high-technology jobs.
About centers
The scientific and technological centers unite organizations, which enjoy special economic conditions, offered by the Russian government in certain areas. Such centers appear throughout the country. They focus on research work, transfer of scientific competences from universities to the commercial sector; they attract students and scientists to work on new technologies, which are of demand on the market.