May 27, 2025

The chemical engineering team’s proposal was completed for their capstone project based on an AIChE Student Design Challenge prompt.

A student’s Mizzou Engineering experience isn’t complete without a hands-on capstone project. For their capstone, chemical engineering students complete an American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) Student Design Challenge.

Brogan Haggerty, Brenda Kudelka, Kaeden O’Connor and Marisa Smith were tasked with designing a new blue hydrogen plant, estimating its cost and evaluating its financial viability.

Blue hydrogen production releases fewer greenhouse gas emissions than traditional hydrogen because carbon dioxide is captured during production, making it a sustainable alternative. Because there are multiple methods to capture CO2, the team had to consider each alternative and find ways to optimize production.

Learn more about this team’s approach and solution to the design challenge and what they learned by completing it.

The preparation

All the core chemical engineering classes were helpful in different parts of the project. It has been super cool to see how the knowledge from all these classes come together and can result in a real-world project.

We also take the class Design 1 prior to Design Capstone. This gets us very familiar with designing chemical processes and using Aspen Plus software, which models different chemical engineering operations.

The process

We began by picking a thermodynamic model based on the characteristics of the chemicals in Aspen Plus. Then we started placing unit operations, such as reactors or distillation towers. There is a loose guideline given in the problem statement for what the process should do, but how we get there is mostly up to the individual teams. It’s a lot of trial and error to get the model to simulate correctly and without warnings.

The progress

Although we have all done design projects in the past, this one was our greatest challenge yet. Dealing with all the different types of reactors in the given process was a big learning curve.

A lot of research went into modelling, sizing and costing these different reactor types. Another challenge was using time outside of class effectively to meet as a team and complete the project. Dr. Scott Christensen was an amazing professor, and we appreciated his help throughout the process.

The projection

Once the Aspen Plus model was working, we performed an economic analysis of the proposed process. We calculated a net present value (NPV) of over $4 billion over a 16-year lifetime.

A lot goes into calculating this value, including equipment sizing and costing, utility pricing, heat integration, cost of labor, inflation rate, raw material cost and location choice. Having this high of an NPV is a very good result.

Learn more about chemical engineering at Mizzou.