Aleksey Kruzhilin, researcher at the Department of Organic Chemistry of the VSU Faculty of Chemistry, is the author of the grant project “Molecular design, developing methods for synthesis, and studying new inhibitors of acid corrosion of substituted pyrimidotriazole class steel from carboxylic acids, including those contained in oil processed products”.
If we talk about the existing results in the field of metal corrosion inhibitors, the Department of Organic Chemistry has been working in this area for about 20 years. The most attention is paid to azoheterocyclic inhibitors, organic substances which contain one or more cycles with nitrogen atoms in their chemical structure. In particular, derivatives of 1,2,4-triazole are being studied.
“As a member of the department, I’ve been involved in research on corrosion inhibitors for the last 7–8 years. For me it all began with a grant that I won in the UMNIK programme in 2015. Back then we were studying the influence of alkyl-aminotriazoles on the corrosion of non-ferrous metals. Further, the department implemented several grants and state assignments in this area, and I was one of those to execute them. From 2020 to 2021, I had the opportunity to work as a project manager at the Russian Centre for Scientific Information. Regarding the topic of corrosion inhibitors, at that time the emphasis was put on inhibitors of acid corrosion of steel which are important for the oil industry. As part of the same project, positive results were obtained for the first time using waste vegetable oils as raw materials for the synthesis of our heterocyclic inhibitors,” said Alexey Kruzhilin.
The current project is also aimed at the development of inhibitors of acid corrosion on steel. All the obtained scientific and applied results were published in various scientific journals. The members of the department have several patents for methods of obtaining corrosion inhibitors.
“This grant brings a lot of pleasure to my research work. It will allow continuing my studies in the familiar area while working on other research tasks. Financial support is important, but there is also something else: winning this kind of grant indicates the relevance of our work, and for a scientist who is involved in fundamental research, it is very important to see a definite result that will can benefit society in the future,” said Alexey Kruzhilin.
The entire path of the young scientist is closely linked with the Department of Organic Chemistry of VSU. This is where he studied and worked, while still being a student, then prepared and defended his PhD thesis. According to Alexey, all members of the department have influenced his development as a scientist. He is especially grateful to Khidmet Shikhaliev, Head of the Department, who was Alexey’s scientific supervisor while he was working on his PhD thesis and remains his mentor up to this day. Khidmet Shikhaliev supervises and monitors the work of most scientific subgroups, and it is hard to imagine what research activities at the Department of Organic Chemistry would be like without his participation. Nadezhda Stolpovskaya, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Chemistry, also made a significant contribution to Alexey’s academic achievements.
“Nadezhda Stolpovskaya was my first scientific supervisor, and without her mentoring during my student years there would be no work that I’m doing today, because she was the one who introduced me to the world of organic chemistry and chemistry of heterocycles, taught the specifics of working in a synthetic laboratory, and cultivated my love and interest to these things. I am especially grateful and indebted for everything, no matter how trivial it may sound, to my parents Alexander Kruzhilin and Lyudmila Kruzhilina, who have been supporting me in all my endeavours and even in such unpopular decisions as my willingness to become a chemist and dedicate my life to science. Since Alexey Kruzhilin is not a full-time lecturer but a researcher, his work actually depends on grants that help him continue his scientific studies.
Speaking about the chemistry of heterocycles, cyclic compounds that contain nitrogen atoms instead of one or several carbon atoms, it is vital to understand that this work is just a small part of many years of experience and developments by the members of the Department of Organic Chemistry. It is difficult to perform these studies from scratch, just following an idea that you came up with. All research areas related to the synthesis and study of new organic compounds are a logical continuation of previous research, as those substances are chemically modified and introduced into further transformations, so that analogues of previously studied substances can be obtained. Such identified patterns are used to obtain new series of compounds. Therefore, chemistry has become a historically established area of research.
“This project is the result of many years of work done by more than a dozen scientists from our department as well as our colleagues from other universities and organisations. Our studies allow obtaining and examining the properties of new compounds of the triazolo-pyrimidine class, including those based on inexpensive plant raw materials. The resulting array of experimental results will primarily serve for the establishment of patterns. For example, it can be determined which chemical structures of new substances allow achieving the greatest anti-corrosion effect. Therefore, there is no particular industrial consumer for the conducted research, and the project is of more fundamental nature. However, the obtained results and their interpretation may actually attract oil enterprises and manufacturers of products used in oil production.
As part of the project implementation, scientists from the Faculty of Chemistry collaborate with various enterprises, such as OOO Research and Production Enterprise “Engineering Constructions Protection”, ZAO Petrokhim Engineering, and OOO Sibur. They also work with leading scientists from other universities.
