Two scientific research achievements from Shanxi province have been recognized with the National Science and Technology Progress Award Second Prize for the year 2025.

The 2025 National Science and Technology Awards were announced on July 8th.

A project titled "Key Technologies and Applications for the Green and Intelligent Development of Scarce High-Quality Residual Coal and Coalbed Methane," led by Taiyuan University of Technology, and another project, "Key Technologies and Applications of High-Performance Heterogeneous Memory Systems," which involved participation from State Grid Shanxi Electric Power Company, were both honored with the National Science and Technology Progress Award Second Prize.

The "Scarce Residual Coal and Coalbed Methane" project addressed major national strategic needs concerning energy security, new rounds of mineral exploration, and coal supply guarantees. It tackled significant challenges in the exploration, green low-carbon development, and digital-intelligent transformation of residual coal and coalbed methane.

Researchers from Taiyuan University of Technology established a high-precision exploration system and a precise assessability determination method for residual coal and coalbed methane occurrence spaces. They developed surface green extraction and utilization technologies alongside intelligent equipment for residual coalbed methane from different sources.

The team also constructed a technical system for adaptive roadway support and active pressure relief during residual coal mining, and researched longwall green mining technologies and intelligent equipment for entire residual coal seams. They pioneered a shortwall green mining technology and intelligent equipment system for block residual coal.

This project has supported the high-recovery-rate mining of strategic coal resources, achieving a transformative breakthrough by enabling the systematic and precise mining of residual coal, which was previously difficult or abandoned. It has formed a "Chinese solution" for residual coal development with complete independent intellectual property rights, placing the成果 at an internationally leading level.

The project's outcomes have been applied and promoted in 93 domestic coal mines and 12 mines in countries including Russia, India, and South Africa.

It has doubled the recoverable reserves of scarce, high-quality residual coal and coalbed methane, facilitated green and low-carbon development, driven the high-end upgrade and digital-intelligent transformation of mining equipment for these resources, enhanced national energy security capabilities, and yielded significant economic and social benefits alongside notable ecological and environmental advantages.

Large-capacity, high-performance heterogeneous memory systems are crucial IT infrastructure for the high-efficiency processing of big data.

The "High-Performance Heterogeneous Memory Systems" project focused on overcoming key technical challenges such as "difficult architecture organization, inefficient data management, and low programming efficiency" faced by such systems.

Researchers from the province actively participated in this effort. Through over a decade of collaborative industry-academia-research-application攻关, they conquered technologies for the dynamic organization of memory architectures enabling heterogeneous fusion and distributed scaling.

They invented a fine-grained, hierarchical mechanism for efficient heterogeneous memory data management and established a highly efficient and compatible programming environment for persistent data in heterogeneous memory.

The team developed high-performance single-machine large-memory servers and distributed memory pool systems, achieving systematic innovation in high-performance heterogeneous memory systems from theory and technology to equipment and application.