At a reception Tuesday evening, Chemical Engineering announced this year’s finalists and the winner of the 2009 Kirkpatrick Chemical Engineering Achievement Award, a biennial prize that the magazine has bestowed continuously since the early 1930s. The award recognizes the most noteworthy chemical engineering technology commercialized anywhere in the world during 2007 or 2008.
Chemical Engineering presented the top prize to Lucite International UK Ltd. (Wilton, U.K.) for its Alpha process for making methyl methacrylate (MMA). The Alpha process is based on a completely new chemistry and radically different flowsheet than existing MMA routes, which leads to a reduction in capital costs of 30–40%, improved safety, and reduced constraints of feedstock availability and scaleup limitations. The winning process was successfully demonstrated in a 125,000 metric ton per year plant that started up in the 4th Q of 2008 at Jurong Island in Singapore.
Honor awards were also presented to: The Dow Chemical Co. (Midland, Mich.) and BASF SE (Ludwigshafen, Germany), for a jointly developed process for the production of propylene oxide via hydrogen peroxide; Evonik Industries AG (Essen) and Uhde GmbH (Dortmund, both Germany), for a jointly developed process for the production of propylene oxide via hydrogen peroxide; Solvay S.A. (Brussels, Belgium), for its Epicerol process for making epichlorohydrin; and to DuPont (Wilmington, Del.), for Cerenol — a new family of renewably sourced, high-performance polyether glycols.
Details of the five processes receiving honors will be published in the December 2009 issue of Chemical Engineering magazine.
Chemical Engineering has awarded this biennial prize continuously since 1933. As of 1959, its name has reflected that of former Chemical Engineering Editorial Director Sidney D. Kirkpatrick, who retired that year.
The 2009 winner will join a long and distinguished roster, studded with such milestones as BOC Group’s low-temperature NOx absorption out of fluegases (2001), Amoco Chemical’s anaerobic treatment of process wastewater (1991), Tennessee Eastman Co.’s coal-based acetic anhydride (1985), E.I du Pont Nemours & Co.’s hollow-fiber reverse osmosis (1971), Dow Corning Corp.’s silicone products (1955), The Dow Chemical Co.’s magnesium from seawater (1941) and Carbide & Carbon Chemical’s petrochemical syntheses (1933).
How the Award works
The Award-competition procedure gets under way early in the award year, with an article in the news pages of Chemical Engineering magazine that presents the competition and invites brief nominations from readers, or directly from companies. Next, the eligible nominations received are sent to each of the heads of the accredited chemical engineering departments at universities in the U.S. and Europe. These professors are each asked to designate what they consider to be the top five nominations.
In late spring, the companies that submitted the five nominations getting the most votes are invited to prepare more-detailed nomination packages. Chemical Engineering sends these to each member of a Board of Judges, also consisting of Ch.E. department heads, for evaluation to determine the winner. The other four finalists become designated as Honor Award recipients.
Gerald Ondrey