Chemical Engineering

Projects

The Chemical Engineering Capstone class participates in Spring Term Design Day. The following Design Problem was worked for Spring 2017:

Manufacturing Facility for Nylon 6-6

In 2017, AIChE Design Competition participants are required to design a safe and sustainable chemical plant to manufacture the polymer Nylon 6-6. About 2 million tons/year of this polymer are produced for a wide range of commercial applications, including textiles.

This project allows students to showcase their comprehensive set of skills, including literature search, process design, reactor design, process hazard analysis, etc. Students must incorporate a wide range of approaches related to chemical process and product design, e.g. flowsheet synthesis and simulation, heat and mass integration for resource conservation, process optimization, process economics, and also environmental, health and safety related issues.

In this open-ended project, students are encouraged to take the project in almost any direction they consider promising within the specified constraints. However, all design choices must be fully justified. Like most real-world design projects, students are not given all the data and information they would like. As a result, they need to make assumptions and provide justification for those assumptions. After choosing a process flowsheet, students must determine the capital and operating costs and compare alternatives to optimize the process economics while meeting safety and sustainability standards.