Our Team Places First in National Competition. Again!

 For the fourth time in the 11-year history of the National Student Design Team Competition sponsored by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), our Oklahoma State University chemical engineering seniors placed First Overall in the team competition.  The 2005 team members were Justin Guinn, Tim Plowman, and Robert Taylor.

Justin is in his final semester at OSU and will receive his BS ChE with a minor in Chemistry in December of 2005.  He is presently seeking industrial employment, and hopes for a position which would require frequent travel.  Justin is from Oklahoma City.

Tim obtained his BS ChE in May, and is employed as an Applications Engineer in Processing & Treating for The Hanover Company, in Broken Arrow, OK.  He describes his new job as follows, “I am mainly doing front-end design along with bidding and proposals.  I have helped with the design of a 120 MMSCFD Cryogenic Plant, and am currently working on a 165 GPM Amine Unit used to remove CO₂ from natural gas.  I also recently traveled to Cheyenne, WY to assist on a plant performance test for an Amine Unit treating 300 MMSCFD of natural gas.  The past few months with Hanover has already been rewarding as I take on new challenges that come my way.”  Tim is from Muskogee, OK.

Robert also graduated in May, and is a Regulatory Compliance Engineer for the ExxonMobil Production Company headquartered in Houston, TX.  He writes, “My major job function is the preparation of air permitting for Alabama, Florida, and offshore Gulf of Mexico.  Also, I handle flaring issues offshore and environmental issue tracking for ExxonMobil U.S. Production. One of the most exciting and new experiences I have had a chance to participate in is offshore platform trips. Flying in a helicopter out to a platform is amazing. These structures are amazing. The size! And they are in waters up to 900 feet, then drilling about another 20,000 ft. Even though they are massive structures it's still hard to believe the amount of processing equipment they can pack on the platforms, and how few operators are used to keep everything up and running. The design of a platform is so efficient!”  Robert is from Tulsa, OK.

 They seem to be having great experiences.

 Their challenge was to design a process to remove excess carbon dioxide, CO₂, from the atmosphere.  CO₂ is one of the “greenhouse gases” resulting from human activity.  The design challenge was jointly authored by engineers in industry and academe. The panel of judges included experienced chemical engineers from both industry and academe. So, success in the competition indicates that the students were able to integrate all of the industrial practice issues as well as properly apply the fundamentals.

The industrialized world has not found a solution to this problem, yet; and Tim comments, “Let’s just say from the beginning, this project was a challenge.  Removing a million metric tons of CO₂ from the atmosphere is no easy task.    The first major issue we faced was finding the best practical method.  There were significantly different routes we could have taken so we spent the first few weeks heavily researching our options.”  

And Robert adds, “We started over at least three times, as we decided that the size and costs would be too great. The trial-and-error was very painful, knowing that we had just spent so much time for what seemed like nothing. I now can see how helpful and beneficial those discarded designs were. Without them we would have never been able to come up with the design we submitted.”

“Since our early CAD models for some pieces of equipment didn’t match the results reported in the literature,” Justin says, “we ended up doing all of the design except the compressor by hand.”  Does he complain or express appreciation? He says, “Doing all of those material and energy balances by hand, especially with multiple recycle streams, made me appreciate just how useful simulations really are.”

There are about 160 undergraduate chemical engineering programs in the US. All are eligible to submit design solutions, with the decision to submit, or not to, made by the professor of the chemical engineering design course. We are very proud of our first place winners, their pursuit of a final design, and their dedication to getting right answers.

Yes, there is a prize for the winning team. Thanks to alumni contributions and support from The Hanover Co. and ExxonMobil, Justin, Tim, and Robert will have an expense-paid trip to the November 2005 AIChE Annual Meeting in Cincinnati, Ohio, where they will officially receive the William A. Cunningham Award and will get 35 minutes to present and respond to questions about their design solution to a national body of engineers and professors. 

Recognizing that the first prize rewards the winner with an intimidating experience, many students are happier to have taken second place in the competition!  But, we are confident that Robert, Tim, and Justin are prepared for the meeting.  

The annual team competition is a relatively new category to the long-standing AIChE individual design competitions. The team competition emphasizes cooperation and integration and requires students to work on a more comprehensive challenge.

Winning is our tradition. The 1995 OSU Chemical Engineering team of Ulrike Krause, Jamie Simons, and Janet Wilson took first place in the first ever AIChE Student Team Design competition.  So did the 1997 OSU ChE Team of Brian Callihan, Richard Bruce, and Sean Hockersmith; and the 2004 team of Megan Burns, Shelby Hutchens, and Ashley Price.

 “Design” is the “capstone” put-it-all-together exercise that characterizes the practice of chemical engineering. Why are OSU students so successful? We think that there are many reasons. Their “Design” course professors, Rob Whiteley and Jan Wagner, are dedicated to the students’ growth, share over 15 years of industrial experience, and give the students great coaching; but, the students did it themselves. We also believe that the entire OSU experience can be credited. Throughout the curriculum, our professors reinforce excellence in the fundamentals, an application perspective, team effectiveness, and the value system to get it right.

Both Jan Wagner and Rob Whiteley will be quick to add that the entire OSU experience positioned the students for exceptional performance.  However, Rob and Jan are fantastic. Each has won a Regents Teaching Award, and Rob also won the Amoco Teaching award. And each year that I've been here, either Jan or Rob has been chosen by the Omega Chi Epsilon seniors as the ChE Professor of the Year.

About their design, Tim says, “Several important factors led to a good design.  First, we made the decision to break the process into ten different facilities and not one large one.”  Robert adds, “We decided to design plants to handle much less volumes and just build more plants. This small decision
early in the process cut our cost dramatically and made the project much
more feasible in the real world.”

“Secondly,” Tim continues, “we needed a cheap way to move large volumes of atmospheric air without using electricity, and chose to use solar chimneys, where the sun’s energy heats the air, and the difference in densities moves it up through the chimney.  Also, we used a regenerative process with caustic soda that allowed us to recover our absorption chemical and eliminate large chemical costs.”

What made you successful?  After, mentioning professors and classmates, Robert answers, “I would also like to thank Lori Mayberry. She taught me trig and calc in high school and really got me on the path to being where I am today. Her classes were the first time I really felt challenged in school and really started to enjoy math and science fields.”

Thanks Ms. Mayberry, and also to all of the educators along the way that inspire students.

And Tim says, “I credit much of our success to the professors and perseverance.  Our ChE professors taught us how to break a complex problem down into manageable pieces.  As far as perseverance, we spent many long nights together in the computer lab hashing through difficult problems.  Each teammate contributed in different areas, and we soon learned the talents that each person brought to the table.   It says a lot when you can spend 16 straight hours together in a lab!  Justin and Robert were both great teammates!”