Faculty of Mechanical Engineering

History of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering

The Faculty of Mechanical Engineering is one of the largest in the university in terms of the number of departments, laboratories, classrooms, and students. There are five graduate departments: “Technology of Aircraft Engines”, “Technology of Mechanical Engineering”, “Metal Cutting Machines and Tools”, “Details of Machines and Lifting and Transport Mechanisms”, “Metal Processing by Pressure”, and one general education department – the Department of Mathematics. Every year, the faculty graduates more than 130 specialists and masters in six specialties. Its graduates successfully work at machine-building and metallurgical enterprises in Zaporizhia and other cities of Ukraine.

The dean’s office must organize, manage, and control all this. It can be compared to the headquarters that organizes the command of the troops. Dean’s offices at the university appeared in the early 1930s. 20th century. During the transition from a technical school to an institute, new structural changes occurred in the management of the institute. In 1934, the departments were replaced by two faculties: general technical and special. The latter was attended by students of 3-4 years, and there were departments of agricultural machinery, cold metalworking, forging and stamping, and foundry. A few years later, this faculty began to be called mechanical and technological (dean M.O. Govorov). At the same time, the faculty of agricultural mechanical engineering, the predecessor of the mechanical engineering faculty, began to operate.

The face of the dean’s office is its dean. This person should be a strategist, an organizer, and be respected both among teachers and among students. Even during the existence of the faculty of agricultural mechanical engineering, its dean was Yakovenko Grigoriy Oleksandrovych (1950-1955) – a graduate of the institute. He had considerable experience in administrative work (he worked in the personnel department of the institute), was the head of the departments of mechanical engineering technology and agricultural machinery. It was this experience that G.O. Yakovenko contributed to the establishment and organization of the dean’s office.

In 1955, a fairly young man became the dean of the same faculty – Zhitnytskyi Serhiy Petrovych. His life path was closely connected with the institute. In June 1945, after graduating from the second year of the Dnipropetrovsk Mining Institute, he was accepted into the third year of the Zaporizhia Automechanical Institute in group 613 TM. Sergey Petrovych studied only with “excellence”, graduated from the institute, postgraduate studies and worked for many years as a teacher, associate professor, having established himself as a talented scientist, from 1979 to 1989 he headed the department “DM and PTM”.

S.P. Zhitnytskyi successfully used all these valuable qualities when he headed the dean’s office of the faculty. He should be considered the first dean of the mechanical engineering faculty, which he headed for 10 years.

In 1967, Levchenko Mykola Andriyovych became the dean of the faculty. He was also a graduate of the ZISM, having graduated in 1940. He worked as an engineer and in managerial positions at the enterprises of the former Soviet Union. In 1965, Mykola Andriyovych, who held the position of director of the Iskra plant, decided to return to his native institute for teaching. Good knowledge of production, high scientific level allowed M.A. Levchenko to pass them on to future specialists for many years, especially the skills of managing a work team.

Mykola Andriyovych worked as a dean part-time until 1977, remaining an associate professor of the Department of Mechanical Engineering Technologies, and was respected by the teachers and students of the faculty. He cared not only about improving the conditions for training future specialists, but also about replacing himself. Also at the Department of Metal-Cutting Machine Tools and Instruments, his son, Boris Nikolaevich Levchenko, a highly qualified teacher and scientist, was respected by students not only for his knowledge but also for his paternal attitude towards them. So the father’s seeds fell on good soil. The Levchenko dynasty continued to serve the university.

For only one year (1977 to 1978) was Yevgeny Grigorovich Kovtun, also a graduate of the Mechanical Engineering Institute and Faculty. Even during his student years, he showed himself to be an excellent student in studies and in scientific research. Together with his groupmate E.G. Kovtun introduced a number of innovations into the production process at the Voykov Plant.

In 1978, Yevgeny Grigorovich went on a foreign business trip to Nicaragua. Then he returned and worked at his favorite department – “Metal-cutting machines and tools” and passed on his rich experience to future specialists.

The “long-lived” dean should be considered Kulbak Yuriy Semenovich, who headed the dean’s office of the faculty for 16 years (from 1978 to 1994). He is also a pupil of “Mashinka”. An inquisitive and intelligent student, creative graduate student, teacher, associate professor and again “Metal-cutting machines and tools”. What was Yu.S. Kulbak in his position? There can be only one answer – he was the best representative of today’s managers, during whose time in the dean’s office the volume of work under business contracts increased significantly, the quality of the teaching staff of the departments increased, and experience in training foreign students was accumulated. The material and technical base of laboratories improved, and relations with engineering and technical workers of a number of factories in Zaporozhye, Ukraine and the Soviet Union improved. Y.S. Kulbak did everything for the comprehensive development and raising the authority of the dean’s office not only at the faculty, but also at the university.

Yuri Semenovich’s successor in 1994 was also a pupil of the “machine” – the automotive faculty – Vasyl Ivanovich Glushko. During his student years, he was an inquisitive student, an excellent student, and a member of the student scientific society. Becoming a graduate student, V.I. Glushko chose the topic of his dissertation research as research in the field of unique composite materials, which was subsequently implemented in aircraft construction on spacecraft and other industries.

The dissertation was successfully defended and Vasyl Ivanovich works at the Department of “DM and PTM”, accumulates experience as a teacher, becomes an associate professor, and later, in 1998, for his significant scientific contribution, he was elected a full member of the Lifting and Transport Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. All this indicates that the head of the dean’s office of the faculty is a comprehensively educated person, with a stable and enduring character, who is a connoisseur of art and music, loves fiction, and he also loves students very much.