In a Tight Bundle

UMP Beryllium production is unique! In addition to us, there are only a few full-cycle Beryllium producers in the world. This fact is not only a reason for pride, but also a reminder that most of the tasks that have to be solved in the production process must be solved on their own.

Among such tasks are the issues of providing raw materials, improving production technology, developing new types of products and other scientific problems. BO is greatly assisted in these matters by the scientific division of the plant. By the way, Research Center (RC), after the collapse of the USSR, was left without the «head» institutions of the industry and had to cope with the emerging challenges independently.

In terms of providing raw materials, production workers together with scieRCe are working on both the possibility of resuming production and processing of Beryllium ore from the Ermakovsky deposit (Buryatia), and working with purchased beryl concentrate. The search for Kazakhstan's Beryllium deposits, which can meet the production needs, is also in progress. So, recently, attention of plant workers has been drawn to Nura-Taldy beryl deposit in central Kazakhstan. Permits for its study have been issued and work is planned to take samples and test them for «enrichability». Scientific support of this direction is provided by the employees of the Laboratory of Innovative Research and Development (LIRD) of National Research Center Konstantin Shestakov, Olga Ilyicheva, Konstantin Shulgin and others.

Current technology for production of technical Beryllium hydroxide also requires constant attention. In particular, it needs to be adapted to different sets of raw materials and reduce the cost of processing to ensure competitiveness of products. In this direction, successful research has been carried out in recent years to develop an extraction technology for extraction of Beryllium from sulfate solutions of BO. The results of the research will add to the bank of UMP intellectual property. The technology of sorption extraction of Beryllium is also currently being studied. In scientific support these works involved the staff of the laboratory of Beryllium – Marcia Inna, Irina Sobchenko, Larissa Bashlaeva and LIRD Engineer-Researcher Tatiana Trubnikova.

The task of reducing the amount of liquid waste generated should be singled out separately. Employees of research center are also actively engaged in it together with production workers.

Changes in market demand for Beryllium products force factory workers to constantly develop new types of Beryllium products. So, the development of technology for producing products from intermetallic compounds Beryllium -titanium and Beryllium -chromium, which can be used in the nuclear and thermonuclear energy of the future, turned out to be very interesting. These successes were made possible thanks to the joint work of Anatoly Vechkutov, Maxim Kolmakov, Sergey Udartsev and Georgy Fominykh, employees of Beryllium Research Center and BO laboratory.

Looking back at the results of many years of fruitful cooperation between scientific departments and Beryllium production, we can be sure that the emerging challenges and problems, despite their complexity, will definitely find their adequate scientific solution and technical implementation!

Konstantin Shestakov, Head of Laboratory of Innovative Research and Development, RC