COLLEGE STATION, Texas, May 9, 2008 – Three groups of students from Texas A&M University’s Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering have been recognized by the Fluor Corporation for their designs of a refinery water process plant.
Kristen Atherton, Milton Chaves, Derek Moser and Justin Phillips are members of the team awarded first place by Fluor for its original design of a hypothetical but potentially fully functional water process plant that operates per Flour’s specifications.
Deborah Bell, Laura Barrera, Francisco Bolado and Sarah Owen were awarded second place, and the team composed of Temilola Awosipe, Wesley Carter, Carolyn Pearce and Bryan Wagner received third-place honors.
Each of the winning teams received a monetary prize from Fluor, this semester’s sponsor of the plant design competition, and the first-place team also was recognized with a plaque commemorating its achievement.
The students’ designs are the results of an intense senior-level capstone chemical engineering course taught by John Baldwin, senior lecturer and head for lower division programs in the department.
The competition, said Baldwin, requires students to conceptualize the comprehensive organization of a process plant. It’s a task, he said, that his soon-to-be graduates are almost certain to encounter in some form as they enter their professional careers.
This semester, students were tasked with developing the optimum design for an oil refinery in Mexico looking to process its water streams to meet ocean disposal standards and/or drinking water standards, Baldwin explained. Students designs had to achieve maximum profit while maintaining a competitive price for the client, he said.
In addition, the students were required to operate under certain limitations. Each student team was told that its company was a small start-up without adequate funds to self-finance and therefore needed to attract a venture capitalist. Because of that important caveat, all designs were to utilize proven purification and separation processes that had been successfully employed in at least two similar commercial applications.
Employing a global workforce of more than 46,000 people, Fluor is one of the world’s largest, publicly owned engineering, procurement, construction and maintenance services companies. A FORTUNE 500 company that is ranked first in FORTUNE magazine’s “Engineering, Construction” category of America’s largest corporations, Fluor maintains a network of offices in more than 25 countries across six continents.
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