Excelling in science

It is an ungrateful job to predict future scientific achievements. But there is every reason to assert that Ukraine will come up with two superb scientific and technological achievements by the end of the current year, which will produce international sensations. Tellingly, both events will occur in Chernivtsi, a seemingly run-of-the-mill city in Ukraine.

The first novelty is that in early December a Volkswagen minibus will set off from the Chernivtsi-based Institute of Thermoelectricity to Berlin which will be hosting an international conference. The bus is a dead spit of the ones that roll off the production line in Hanover, but it will have a very important advantage: it is 5 percent more efficient than its standard German counterpart.

Now, overcoming a host of difficulties, engineers are bringing the prototype up to shape. When a car engine works a fiery jet with a temperature of up to 600 Celsius gushes from its exhaust pipe. Scientists and engineers had to make sure that the thermoelectric generator does not get clogged or ruined by the high temperature. Incidentally, the generated energy is enough to provide the vehicle with electric power even if the driver switches on the conditioner to full capacity.

Almost all work has been finished. It can be expected that the Volkswagen, revamped by the Ukrainians, will cause a furor in Berlin. It has been reported, though, that American and other companies will also bring along proposals on how to put the hitherto unused exhaust gas heat to good use. However, the Ukrainians have so far been head and shoulders above all the others in this field.

The world already believes in the radiant future of the Ukrainian physicists’ design. Taiwan’s Center of Innovational Technologies, which is intensively developing a new-generation auto engine, is going to incorporate Anatychuk’s generator into a serial-production motor. It is thus planned to increase the power of a serially-produced car by 10 percent.

What does the not-so-common word “thermoelectricity” mean? It is way of directly transforming heat into electricity. This is achieved by means of a simple structure with two dissimilar metals or semiconductors. Before speaking about thermoelectricity, the abovementioned institute’s director, Prof. Lukian Anatychuk, usually puts a boiling water cup on a polished plate. This immediately works a miracle: a propeller begins to spin and a light bulb flashes. Anatychuk explains: “I put a hot cup on coupled wires made of different metals. This transforms heat into electricity. It allows us to create wonderful projects for various sectors of the national economy.”

Prof. Anatychuk once accompanied an exhibition in the United Arab Emirates and showed this experiment to the visiting emir. Before this, the emir had been looking at instruments without too much enthusiasm. But things changed when Anatychuk told him that while oil reserves were limited, there is a lot of free energy around: he went out to the desert, which was just behind the exhibition’s door, filled a cup with hot sand and put it on the aforesaid plate. The propeller immediately began to spin and a bulb flashed. The emir and his retinue were literally stunned. They checked for a long time whether there was any trick involved. They themselves scooped hot sand in the desert and put it on the device, but everything was the real deal.

Many countries have appreciated thermoelectricity and the way the Institute of Thermoelectricity deals with it. For this reason, even the International Academy of Thermoelectricity is registered in Ukraine.

This is not the only sensation nurtured in the bowels of the Chernivtsi-based institute. The institute director, Prof. Anatychuk, recently visited the famous Motor Sich plant in Zaporizhia. Local engineers have long been tormented by what they think is an insolvable problem: gas turbines that pump gas through the pipelines become very vulnerable when the supply of electricity is suddenly cut off. This does not happen very often, but when it does, it may cause very expensive accidents. Unfortunately, all the existing methods of compensation for the lost electricity have been not very reliable in such situations.

It was the Institute of Thermoelectricity that once again offered a radical way out. Moreover, they are set to put their solution into practice. To this end, the institute has begun to design and manufacture the world’s most powerful thermoelectric generator with an installed capacity of 100-200 kW. This will be enough to protect gas-pumping turbines from problems in case of an unforeseen power cut.

There is one more, unexpected, side to this project. Although the Institute of Thermoelectricity is Ukraine’s first research institution of this kind, it does not in fact have any Ukrainian orders. So the Zaporizhia order shows that this cutting-edge technology may find an extremely wide application in Ukraine, not only in the high-tech world.

This was the first new institute in our independent country. However, pleasure was mixed with bitterness: no one in this country needed what this unique institution could do. The nascent elite cared very little about the scientific and technological potential achieved by Ukrainian researchers and engineers, or about the prospects that its rational application in the national economy (not only in the military sphere) may provide.

Unfortunately, many high-end organizations that worked for the defense sector began to degenerate, collapse, and die before our very eyes. Perhaps, the same fate was also assigned to the newly-established Institute of Thermoelectricity. What saved it was the fact that Anatychuk is one of those who know how to hit back.

In the very first years of ruin he visited the world’s leading companies that dealt with the same problems that he did and got acquainted with what they were capable of. Although institutions of this kind were more or less secret and Anatychuk himself had been kept under a veil of secrecy, his foreign colleagues turned out to know about his achievements very well. Whenever he was abroad, they often tried to win him over, promising him fantastic salaries and excellent conditions for work. This only made Anatychuk even more convinced that his institute was on the right path and all they were to do was bring the organization into line with new market-economy conditions.

Are there no offers from the tumbling businesses inside the country? Are there fewer and fewer offers from the Russians? No problem! Anatychuk had a rule, and he demanded that all his associates obey it: we must march ahead of all in the world — then orders will come running by themselves. And they really came. The first to appear in Chernivtsi were… the Japanese. As time showed, they were very demanding, even relentless, customers. But it became much easier to work with the Americans and Europeans after the Japanese “schooling.”

What interested the Japanese first of all was not space or military applications but the use of thermoelectricity in everyday life. The researchers, who had been previously applying thermoelectricity to unique submarine missile homing heads, suddenly took on and fulfilled an order for… a Japanese restaurant chain.

The next to turn to the Chernivtsi scientists were French space explorers. They had heard that Chernivtsi could make thermoelectric coolers which even the Americans, the Western world’s “gods” in this area, could not. Naturally, the French did not believe this. But they had no alternative and came to Chernivtsi just in case. The unique French order was fulfilled very fast. They were so impressed that they chose to request the Ukrainians to manufacture very important components for their fifth-generation nuclear submarines. This order was also fulfilled to meet the stipulated date.

No wonder, this resulted in developing and manufacturing the most sophisticated space orientation instruments. Hundreds of spacecrafts are now equipped with these devices. Prof. Anatychuk is especially proud that his instruments have also been installed in the space probe now bound for the Asteroid Ring. In other words, he is involved in a grand project of warning our planet that a certain cosmic body is approaching it too closely. He has also made a contribution to the spaceships that land on the Solar System’s remote planets. When he looks into the sky at night, he can point to dozens of spacecrafts that carry the devices he designed.

Prof. Anatychuk and his associates are now mostly focusing on the development of medical equipment. Yet the Chernivtsi institute’s two latest designs are a super-economical automobile and an early warning device for gas-pumping stations. Has the ice been really broken and will Ukraine also need high-tech projects? Incidentally, Prof. Borys Paton, President of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, is doing his best to support this work.

The only alarming thing is that the Institute of Thermoelectricity suffers from a disease that keeps undermining the entire academic system. In spite of the researchers’ globally acclaimed successes, young scientists are running away because the institute is unable to provide them with housing. The institute director, a world-renowned scientist, has to set aside urgent problems and run hectically, knocking on top officials’ doors in a hope to persuade them to allot funds for building an apartment house for young research associates. No success so far…