In March of every year, our fourth year graduating engineering students complete a “capstone” group design project. This is meant to be a significant design experience where students can pull together concepts from across their program, and it’s a requirement for engineering program accreditation. Some of these projects are inspired by faculty research, others by the students’ own ideas, and still others by collaborations with industry partners.

For anyone interested in finding out more about the types of things that certain engineering programs cover, it’s useful to have a look at these projects. For 2024, the Chemical Engineering project descriptions are available here. There are 28 projects, covering quite a wide range of topic areas. Here are just a few mentions of ones that caught my attention.

• Quite a few projects deal with battery materials, battery design, and disassembly and recycling of batteries
• Others use biotechnology to depolymerize plastics, make bioplastics, or recover natural sunscreens from algae.
• Some have examined opportunities in the nuclear industry, by waste reduction, improving energy efficiency, and improving safety.
• There are others dealing with wastewater treatment and waste recycling, waste use in water treatment, and greenhouse gas reduction in cement and other product processing.
• There are many more in diverse areas such as industrial heat transfer, hydroponic agriculture, residential water treatment, solar and electric vehicle technologies, and others.

It’s interesting that many projects have a significant sustainability and/or environmental aspect to them. This just illustrates that chemical engineering has evolved with the times and societal needs to address many areas such as water treatment, air pollution, sustainable materials, recycling materials, green energy, food and agriculture, etc. As I’ve stated many times in the past, any problem that involves materials and/or energy transformations probably has roles for chemical engineers.