(130g) Taking Cheme-Sports from on-Site to a Live Virtual Competition

ChemE-Sports^TM is part of the chemical engineering culture and has now gone virtual. Inspired by the success of the ChemE-Sports^TM in 2019 at the AIChE Annual Meeting in Orlando, an academic and industry team of a faculty member at Columbia University Chemical Engineering and Simulation Solutions Inc. developed a new method of using simulators for an on-line competition that can serve as foundation for chemical engineering competitions of the future. This international competition was open to universities as well as industry teams. The competition was created around the safety and optimization of a pentane-hexane distillation simulation owned by Simulation Solutions Inc. A competitive team bracket was developed for the competition during the virtual AIChE Student Conference on Sunday 15 November 2020. The results of the 2020 competition and lessons learned are presented here. This presentation will focus on the competition and modifications for remote participation from student and industry groups around the world.