Honoring innovation

The first round of judging in Chemical Engineering’s 2009 Kirkpatrick Chemical Engineering Achievement Award competition (CE, January, p. 19) has produced the following five finalists (in alphabetical order): • The Dow Chemical Co. (Midland, Mich.) and BASF SE (Ludwigshafen, Germany), for an industrial process for producing propylene oxide (PO) via hydrogen peroxide • DuPont (Wilmington, Del.), for commercializing Cerenol — a new family of high-performance polyether glycols made from corn-derived 1,3-propanediol (Bio-PDO) • Lucite International (Southampton, U.K.), for its Alpha technology — a new process for making methyl methacrylate (MMA) • Solvay S.A. (Brussels, Belgium), for its Epicerol process — a new process for producing epichlorohydrin from glycerine • Uhde GmbH (Dortmund) and Evonik Industries AG (Essen, both Germany), for the HPPO process for making PO via H2O2 From these five finalists — selected by heads of chemical engineering departments of U.S. and European universities — the winner will be chosen by a board of judges composed of chemical-engineering-department heads that were selected by their peers. In the December issue, the winner will be announced, along…