COLLEGE STATION, Texas, May 8, 2009 – 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 crude oil processing plant.
Thomas Carmine, Haley Holub, Jennifer Loving and Phillip Niksch are members of the team awarded first place by Fluor for its original design of a crude oil processing unit that operates per Flour’s specifications and which was undertaken as part of an intense senior-level capstone chemical engineering course taught by John Baldwin, senior lecturer in the department.
The team of Carla Beutlich, Jennifer Cunningham, Michael Kingrey, Tri Le, and Felipe Rendon was awarded second place, and the team composed of Lance Brockway, James Hall, Jordan Orsak and Tina Parthum received third-place honors.
The plant design 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 a new crude oil processing unit that can take incoming oil and separate it into basic distillation products. As part of the project, Baldwin explained, students were required to determine the cost of the crude oil to be purchased by the company utilizing their plant designs with the intent of selling the oil back to the primary company at a fixed price. In addition to determining the new price, the students were required to demonstrate how their plant designs are safer, more reliable and generally superior to competitors.
Each of the winning teams receives a monetary prize from Fluor, this semester’s sponsor of the plant design competition, and the first-place team will be recognized with a plaque commemorating its achievement.
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.
