CHE students win AIChE Student Design Contest

CHE students win AIChE Student Design Contest

Tuesday, November 12, 2024

Media Contact: Tanner Holubar | Communications Specialist | 405-744-2065 | [email protected]

Four students in the School of Chemical Engineering (CHE) won first place in the 2024 American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) Student Design Contest over the summer. They received their awards during a ceremony on Oct. 27 in San Diego.  

Ellison Denoso, Johnathon Kemp, Quinn Stretcher and Tyme Taylor competed against students from across the country to see who had the best technical and economic solution to a problem facing the country. 

There have been 30 contests hosted by AIChE, in which Oklahoma State University students have won the contest seven times and come in second three times.  

The problem students work to solve is usually provided by the companies that are working to address the problem. Students have tried to solve problems such as vaccine production, recycling of plastics and converting natural gas to gasoline.   

The students had 60 days to work on the design project, which was done in Stillwater. The project is then submitted to AIChE, who evaluates entries and selects the winners.  

At OSU, as part of the Chemical Engineering Design class, all senior students work on designing a process to address the prompted problem. Teams are limited to four students, and they are not allowed to get outside help, including from any OSU faculty.  

Design instructors, Dr. Josh Ramsey and Dr. Clint Aichele, both professors in CHE, chose the top two designs to be entered into the contest.  

"The toughest part of the contest for Dr. Aichele and I is choosing the two contest entries that we think have the best chance of winning," Ramsey said. "We have such talented and hard-working students that many more than two student designs would have an excellent chance of winning the contest." 

Ramsey said this year's problem was titled "Power-to-Gas," and posed challenges related to carbon dioxide and renewable energy.  

Students developed a process to convert carbon dioxide and hydrogen into natural gas. Hydrogen was produced using electricity from renewable sources, such as wind and solar power, to electrolyze the water.  

Pictured (from left) are Johnathon Kemp, Taylor Tyme and Ellison Denoso.

Ramsey said since the United States does not have an existing infrastructure to make use of hydrogen, it was not an ideal final product.  

"Instead, the students were asked to explore methods for converting hydrogen into a more useful fuel, such as natural gas, which can be put into our existing infrastructure that supplies natural gas to buildings and homes," Ramsey said. "An additional advantage of converting hydrogen to natural gas is that it utilizes carbon dioxide, thereby providing an alternative to emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The students explored different sources for carbon dioxide, including power plants, petrochemical plants, fertilizer plants and livestock." 

All four students graduated from CHE in May 2024. Kemp said winning the competition was unexpected but something that he became extremely proud of once reality set in.  

"It was nice to be recognized after all the hard work and late nights we put in on this project," Kemp said.  

A design competition focused on green energy and creating synthetic natural gas from recovered carbon dioxide was different from previous petroleum projects the team had been a part of.  

"The design process for myself consisted of reading the problem statement about 10 times before I realized exactly what was expected," Kemp said. "This was followed by several trials and errors before finally having 'eureka!' moments in the software. Finally, we had to put it all together in a cohesive report that must have been changed and tweaked a couple dozen times at least." 

Kemp said he would enjoy working with this type of process in the future as renewable energy is the industry he has chosen. He said he hoped the design competition and the fact he is gaining experience in the solar industry will lead him down a path to do so.  

Denoso is now working full time as an environmental engineer with Valero at the company's refinery in Ardmore, Oklahoma. Being part of the first-place design team came as a welcome surprise.  

"I know my group mates and I worked very hard on the project and got along well together over the course of the project," Denoso said. "It's a great honor to be recognized for that hard work at the national level." 

The principles of chemical engineering and skills of understanding a variety of unit operations, optimization, process safety and economic evaluations from the project will help him in his career moving forward. 

"Having that background going into industry was helpful, and learning how to work within a group setting and develop those relationships was a great experience," Denoso said. 

The CHE faculty take tremendous pride when students win the AIChE national student design contest. Ramsey, Aichele and Jiang teach the process design and safety courses, allowing the professors to get to know their students well over multiple semesters.  

"We take much personal satisfaction in seeing the students evolve from 'students' into 'engineers,'" Ramsey said. "Competing and winning a national design contest is external validation of what we see over and over each year." 

Ramsey also said the CHE program has developed a lengthy history of finishing first or second in the design contest. It began when Dr. Rob Whiteley and Dr. Jan Wagner were teaching process design.  

Ramsey took the course when they taught it, and he co-taught the course with both of them when he became a faculty member with CHE. He said he has such respect for the faculty before him,and he feels a sense of responsibility to not let those professors down and takes personal pride in seeing students succeed at the highest levels.  

"We have many external metrics that speak to the quality of the chemical engineering program at OSU," Ramsey said. "For example, our students regularly pass the Fundamentals of Engineering exam at a rate higher than the national average.

"Winning the national design contest is another metric that shows how well students are being prepared for careers in chemical engineering. By my count, we have won first place seven times and second place (i.e., honorable mention) three times in the last 30 years. A third of the time, OSU students are recognized as one of the top two teams in the country." 

Public link

Please use the above public link if you want to share this noodl on another website.