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The 2017 Kirkpatrick Award

| By Dorothy Lozowski

Every other year, Chemical Engineering honors the most-noteworthy chemical engineering technology that was commercialized anywhere in the world during the previous two years with the Kirkpatrick Chemical Engineering Achievement Award. The nominations for 2017 are now open.

The Kirkpatrick Award has been awarded continuously since 1933. In 2015, Dow Performance Chemicals received the award for its achievements with Intune olefin block copolymers. Honors were given to Newlight Technologies for its AirCarbon process; Clariant for HGM Technology for propylene dehydrogenation; AM Technology for the Coflore Reactor and CB&I for CDAlky alkylation technology. The 2017 winner will join this distinguished group and earlier winners that include milestones such as Genomatica’s process for bio-based 1,4-butanediol (2013); Chevron Phillips Chemical for significant advances in alpha-olefins technology (2005); and Carbide & Carbon Chemical’s petrochemical syntheses (1933). The full list of past winners can be found at www.chemengonline.com/kirkpatrick.

The nomination procedure

To submit a nomination, simply send an unillustrated nominating brief of up to 500 words to: [email protected]. Any person or company, worldwide, can submit a nomination. The deadline for nominations is March 15, 2017.

In order to be considered, each nomination should include the following three items: 1) a summary of the achievement and novelty of the technology; 2) a description of the difficult chemical-engineering problems solved; and 3) a description of how, where and when the development first became commercial in 2015 or 2016.

If you are aware of an achievement that qualifies for nomination, but do not have enough of information to write a brief, contact the company involved, either to get the information or to propose that the firm itself submit a nomination. Companies are also welcome to nominate achievements of their own.

The selection procedure

After the deadline of March 15, the nominations will first be reviewed for validity. They will then be sent to department heads at accredited university chemical-engineering departments, who accordingly, constitute the Committee of Award. Each professor will vote, independently of each other, for a maximum of five best achievements.

The entries that collectively receive the most votes become the finalists in the competition. Each finalist company will then be asked to submit additional information, such as a description of the technology, performance data and examples of the teamwork that generated the achievement.

Copies of these more-detailed packages will then be sent to a Board of Judges, which will have been chosen from within the Committee of Award. The Board will judge the entries to select the most noteworthy. The company that developed that achievement will be named the winner of the 2017 Kirkpatrick Chemical Engineering Achievement Award and the other finalist companies will be designated to receive Honor Awards. The winner will be announced at the Chem Show in New York this fall.■

 

Dorothy_Lozowski 

  Dorothy Lozowski, Editor in Chief