MEM Professor Nick Cernansky, MEM graduate students Mac Haas, CBE Professor Richard Cairncross, CBE seniors Jason Chapman, Douglas Crawford, Van Nguyen, and Pamela Powell presented a poster on their design of a municipal scale plant to convert trap (sewer) grease into biodiesel at the US EPA’s National Sustainable Design Expo on the National Mall in Washington, May 9th and 10th.

The MEM/CBE Team received Honorable Mention for the quality of their design and their proposal.

Their design was based on laboratory work performed by MEM and process modeling conducted as part of the CBE senior design project. Research was funded from a proposal written by Haas and MEM alums Ken Letterle (’05) and Jose Sanchez (’05) for the EPA’s P3 Award: People, Prosperity and the Planet Student Design Competition for Sustainability.

With the MEM side of the project under the direction of advisor Dr. Nicholas Cernansky, the original P3 Award- Winning Senior Design project was created to provide a technical and economic evaluation of a trap grease to biodiesel conversion process. It also seeks to characterize the properties of trap grease to provide design data for a pilot-scale trap grease upgrading process.

view Honorable Mention ceritificate here (PDF)