Bringing ChemE-Sports, a Safety and Optimization Competition, to the Chemical Engineering Profession

SURG ChemE-Sports is quickly becoming part of the chemical engineering culture. Inspired by Esports, in 2019, an academic and industry team of a faculty member at Columbia University Chemical Engineering and Simulation Solutions Inc. developed a new method of using simulators and sponsored a national competition including 13 universities. The competition was created around the safety and optimization of a pentane-hexane distillation simulation owned by Simulation Solutions Inc. An NCAA Regional bracket was developed for the competition at the annual AIChE Meeting in Orlando, Florida on 10 November 2019. The results of the 2019 competition and lessons learned are presented here. This presentation will focus on the competition and how it was developed.