Our team places first in national competition. Again!

For the third time in the 10-year history of the National Student Design Competition sponsored by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), our Oklahoma State University chemical engineering seniors placed first in the team competition.  Team members were Ashley Price, Shelby Hutchens, and Megan Burns.

Ashley is now an upstream engineer at ConocoPhillips in Houston, TX, and graduated as an OSU Top Senior by the OSU Alumni Association.  Shelby (daughter of ECEN Prof Chris Hutchens) is now in grad school at Cal Tech in bio engineering, and played Varsity OSU Basketball here.  Megan will graduate in December 2004, held several student officer positions, performed undergraduate research through a Wentz Project, and has accepted a position as an Environmental Engineer for Valero Energy Corp., Ardmore, OK.

Their challenge was to design a process to improve the environment, to convert waste ethylchloroacetate that was stored in a salt-dome cavern.  They had to detail their concept for an economically viable, safe, process for conversion of 20-year-old bio-hazardous waste extracted from salt caverns into a useful or disposable product. The conversion's by-product is ethanol, so the students demonstrated that a company could use it, not only to clean up a site and avert pending federal fines, but also to reduce annual project costs.

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.

There are about 150 AIChE student chapters 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.

Yes, there is a prize for the winning team. Thanks to alumni contributions, Megan, Shelby, and Ashley will have an expense-paid trip to the 2004 AIChE Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas (so far so good), where they will officially receive the William A. Cunningham Awardand will get 35 minutes to present and respond to questions about their design solution to a national body of engineers and professors (That’s a prize?!).

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.

Wining is our tradition. The 1995 OSU Chemical Engineering team of Ulrike Krause, Jamie Simons, and Janet Wilson also took first place in the AIChE Student Design competition. And so did the 1997 OSU ChE Team of Brian Callihan, Richard Bruce, and Sean Hockersmith.

 “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 have been chosen by the Omega Chi Epsilon seniors as the ChE Professor of the Year.