The winners of the innovative projects competition held as part of the Sikorsky Challenge 2025 festival, which recently took place at KPI, have been announced. They will receive funding to implement their ideas. This is the fourth festival held during the war, so its priorities included a defense forum and projects aimed at protecting the civilian population and critical infrastructure. The authors describe one of the developments that addresses an urgent need: the construction of shelters.
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As a reminder, the XIV International Festival of Innovative Projects “Sikorsky Challenge 2025” was held at Igor Sikorsky KPI at the end of October. A total of 126 projects from 24 cities of Ukraine took part in the competition. The developments concerned defense and security, energy sustainability and ecology, biomedical engineering and human health, digitalization, industrial high-tech, etc. The startup projects were evaluated by an authoritative international jury in four categories: project idea, technological solution, solutions to potential customers' problems, and business model.
The winner in the section “Digital Country, Industrial High Tech and Agrotech” and in the nomination “Best Technological Solution for a Startup” was the project “Underground Storage Facilities Made of Soil Concrete,” presented by the Department of Geoengineering of the Institute of Energy Engineering (project team: Prof. H. Haiko, Assoc. Prof. A. Gan, Assoc. Prof. V. Vapnichna, PhD candidate M. Bovkunovich, graduate I. Matviychuk).
Military threats have led to the need for widespread use of underground storage facilities, but their cost, construction time, and reliability do not fully meet customer requirements. In addition, to protect against the impact of charges on the perimeter of the structure, special engineering protection of shallow-laid objects is required, which can be reinforced with a frame (sarcophagus) made of soil concrete.
The project team has proposed an innovative technology for the construction of underground shelters from soil concrete, which involves a new application of jet grouting for soil consolidation around the perimeter of the underground structure. Unlike existing open (in pits) and underground (mining) methods of constructing storage facilities, underground construction is proposed to be carried out from the ground surface using drilling technologies, forming a closed fastening (frame) of the structure from connected cylindrical elements formed by jet grouting of soils.
This ensures an increase in the protective capabilities of underground storage facilities (due to the properties of soil concrete, effective regulation of the required thickness of soil concrete structures and the depth of their laying), speed and technological efficiency of construction (thanks to the jet grouting technique) and reduction of construction costs (thanks to the refusal to open and maintain an excavation pit and the use of surrounding soil as a filler for soil concrete).
The technology proposed by KPI scientists will be useful in the construction of underground schools and civil defense shelters for educational and industrial institutions, protective structures for energy and industrial enterprises, hydrocarbon storage facilities, individual protective structures for private homes, etc. However, the authors see an even broader application of the developed innovative technology in the development of urban underground construction for peacetime (according to preliminary estimates, up to 25% of shallow underground structures should be built using this method).
The project team offers investors the creation of joint ventures (startups); the conclusion of license agreements for the disposal of intellectual property and know-how; field testing and monitoring of the condition of soil-concrete structures; author's supervision of design and construction works. During the Festival, initial contacts were made with interested organizations, which may develop into long-term cooperation.