The J. Ray and Priscilla J. Bowen Endowment was established by former UW Dean of Engineering and Chemical Engineering Faculty member, J. Ray Bowen, to recognize outstanding student performance in senior design projects. The department announced the four winning teams of the Bowen Design Awards at the Chemical Engineering Graduation ceremony on June 9. Professors Eric Stuve and Stuart Adler report on this year's projects from the ChemE 486 Capstone Design class.
Bowen Design Competition – Project Scope
Students were challenged to design a process to convert carbon-neutral electricity to liquid fuels. The basic idea was to capture CO2 (either at the emission source or from air), use solid oxide electrolysis to covert the CO2 and water to syngas, and then synthesize liquid fuels using the Fischer-Tropsch process. Each design team was assigned a different scale/implementation of this basic idea, spanning off-grid operation of a household, to large-scale synfuels based on nuclear power.
Grand Prize Winner of the Bowen Award for Excellence in Design
Team: Designin' II: Exergetic Boogaloo
Team Members: Bennett Battistoni, Max Calcagno, Jacob Hatzinger, and Austin Im
Design: Carbon Dioxide Sequestration and Conversion from TransAlta Centralia Coal Plant
The Designin-II, Exergetic Bugaboo team developed a large scale process to convert nuclear power to fuel (using CO2 emissions from the Centralia coal plant, Washington State's only coal powered plant). This team dug unusually deeply into both the technical and economic aspects of their design, and used initial failure as inspiration for innovation. In particular, they came up with some clever ideas for heat integration, including use of both heat and power from a nuclear reactor. Their report is a model of clear and effective communication.
Winners of the Bowen Award for Excellence in Design
Team: Pirates of Ross Island
Team Members: Graham Henry, Victoria Hildreth, and Connor Zeleny
Design: Carbon Dioxide to Liquid Fuels for the McMurdo Research Station in Antarctica
With only one fuel shipment per year, the McMurdo Research Station would greatly benefit from a local source of liquid fuels. The Pirates of Ross Island (on which McMurdo is located) developed such a system by taking advantage of the abundant wind power there. Their design was both technically and economically superb. They even took into account higher plant construction costs due to having to ship everything in on a container ship. By virtue of its remoteness, the McMurdo project could be economically feasible given foreseeable increases in conventional fuel prices.
Team: The Carbon Cowboys
Team Members: Jalen Son, Jinsung Kim, and Samira Shaar
Design: Production of Liquid Fuels for Fueling Stations from Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide
The Carbon Cowboys investigated a proposal for converting atmospheric carbon dioxide into liquid fuels that could be sold at a West Texas filling station. The team quickly found that this was economically feasible, even with the difficult carbon dioxide capture, and lack of water. They continued to investigate a number of other options and ended up with selling carbon dioxide-derived liquid fuels to a refinery that could process it further to gasoline and diesel fuel. This group's work was first rate and of uniform caliber throughout the quarter. They also had good rapport with each other.
Team: Apex Liqui-Fuelers
Team Members: Brendan Cysewski, Nick Ivarson, and Melissa Le
Design: Liquid Fuel Production from Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Renewable Electricity in Remote Locations
Apex designed a process to mitigate atmospheric CO2 using wind power. The process uses production and marketing of carbon-neutral liquid fuels (as an additive to traditional fuels) to pay for the cost of CO2 mitigation. Besides coming up with a solid, well-researched design, this team also frequently led in-class discussion of the various challenges faced by all the teams which resulted in benefiting everyone.