NUWEE membership in the CPEA-ST/10081TENOR international project consortium enabled students to attend the Internship at Belarusian State Technological University.

Within the framework of the TENOR project, two students from NUWEE participated in the Internship: PhD student Oleksii Kozhushko and master student Volodymyr Besediuk.

The internship consisted of practice at 3 principal departments at BSTU: Department of industrial ecology, Department of biological technologies and Department of energy saving, hydraulics and heat engineering. Each student had a personal work plan at the university. There was a number of BSTU specialists as supervisors for the period of internship: Artem Vorobiov - senior lecturer at the department of technology of inorganic substances and general chemical technology, Olexandr Dubina - assistant lecturer at the department of industrial ecology, Egor Sapon - assistant lecturer at the department of industrial ecology, RaisaMarkevich - assistant professor at the department of biological technologies, Victor Volodin - professor at the department of energy saving, hydraulics and heat engineering.

Volodymyr Besediuk was involved in number of laboratory research activities on phosphorus and nitrogen content of struvite by using modeling materials - dolomite and raw wastewater centrate. All laboratory activities were done at the department of industrial ecology.

After familiarisation with methodologies of measurement of nitrogen and phosphorus content in material and with laboratory equipment student had a task to do some intermediate laboratory work. This work consisted in preparation of material (screening and roasting), measurement of material activity by titrimetric method and construction of calibration schedule. As it turned out, this work required much time for needed quantity of material, so final measurement of nutrients content in materials was done by BSTU specialists later on.

Moreover, student had got a topic for the project paper - "Overview of methods and technologies in urban agriculture", and had to pass intermediate results at the end of internship.

Also, student had got a number of consultations with assistant professor Markevich Raisa about reuse of wastes and dairy serum in dairy production.

Oleksii Kozhushko was doing the research at BSTU at the department of energy-saving, hydraulics and heat engineering. The research work was related to utilization of heat pumps and heat exchanger in heating and hot water supply systems. The projects of energy efficient buildings with heat pumps which have been implemented in Belarus was analysed. These buildings had already been constructed in the cities of Minsk, Hrodna and Mahiliou. These are designed engineering systems which utilize low-potential energy, such as sunlight, wastewater and exhaust ventilation air. Heating and ventilation systems are equipped with modern automatics which allows to vastly increase the efficiency of energy utilization and provide of comfortable indoor conditions. The collected data are going to be used in further research.

The review of available heat exchangers' constructions for wastewater heat recovery and calculations of in-sewer heat exchangers were performed. Moreover, the modelling of thermodynamic cycle of the heat pump was performed. The PhD student had got acquainted with specialized software which allows to determine the parameters of thermodynamic system with heat pump and sewer heat exchangers. The data from the case studies were used for calculations. All research and educational work was supervised by professor of the department, DSc Victor Volodin.

During the internship students visited wastewater treatment plant of Minsk.

The excursion was conducted by Egor Sapon - assistant at department of industrial ecology of BSTU. Students were familiarised with structures and technological processes of wastewater treatment at WWTP. Furthermore, assistant Egor Sapon presented the experimental installation at WWTP.

This installation was provided by a foreign company in order to estimate the biogas potential. It allows to determine the volume of biogas outcome and it's composition. There are 2 anaerobic digestion regimes: thermophilic and mesophilic, and different proportions of raw and dewatered sewage sludge are examined for this purpose. Accordingly to the results the ways of further WWTP's modernisation are going to be proposed.

Additionally, wastewater samples at the sludge dewatering station were collected for further laboratory experiment which allows to determine the nutrients composition in this wastewater sample.

Also eventful programme of social activities was suggested to the students, which included different excursions around the city of Minsk.

Article by Volodymyr Besediuk and Oleksii Kozhushko