(368f) Developing AIChE National Student Design Competition Problems by Collaborations Among Industry and Government Sponsors and Academia Participants

The AIChE National Student Design Competition has been held annually since 1932. This problem is distributed to every department of chemical engineering in the U.S. and the competition is open to all who comply with its ruless. Typically, 20-30 schools out of 157 dpartments of ChE in the U.S. participate in the competition and a roughly equal number use the problem in their senior design sequence without participating in the competition. The search for sponsors is an ongoing task. The appeal to students of industrial and governmental sponsors is that the problems are often considered more "real" than those that might be provided through academics alone. The challenge is to attract industrial and government sponsors to assist with the preparation of the problem and the evaluation of the national competition.