The Hexius Group

www.che.tamu.edu/student/plant-design-competition-winners...

My senior plant design team, The Hexius Group, won second place out of eleven teams in the Spring 2008 Senior Chemial Engineering Plant Design Competition at Texas A&M University. Our task was to design a process to transform two refinery wastewater streams into either potable water or ocean effluent. Our process consisted of a sour water stripper to remove ammonia and hydrogen sulfide from the sour water stream and a typical water treatment section to clean the treated sour water stream and the process water stream (chemical injection, rapid mix/coagulation, flocculation, sedimentation, and filtration).

I know it's probably typical for the second place team to feel jilted, but our professor actually said that he thought we should have won. Fluor, the company that sponsored the design competition, picked the winners. Our professor said that my team was his pick, so we'll be getting a better grade on our report than the team that Fluor picked. We were disappointed that our design wasn't chosen by Fluor, but it helped that our professor acknowledged that he thought we should have won -- at least it's proof that my feeling that we should have won isn't completely unjustified.

Something else was kind of interesting -- the first place team had three guys and one girl, my team had three girls and one guy, and the third place team had two girls and two guys -- so it worked out that an even number of guys and girls placed in the design competition.