Chemical Engineering

New Cooperative Education Program Offers Students Professional Experience

Kevin Tolley works on gas phase polymerization processing in his second co-op assignment with Equistar Chemicals.

The "ultimate scholarship" is now being offered through the Department of Chemical Engineering at CU-Boulder.

This semester, three students are on industrial assignments as part of the new Cooperative Education Program that alternates academic semesters with "co-op" work semesters. The program provides students with paid professional experience while they complete the requirements for the chemical engineering undergraduate degree. Students in the co-op program can earn enough money to pay for their entire college tuition bill and living expenses, and their time counts towards their employment status with the companies for which they work.

Undergraduate Kevin Tolley helped pioneer the co-op program last summer when he was a sophomore by working on a heat transfer design in his first co-op assignment for Equistar Chemicals in Morris, Illinois. After completing the fall semester at CU, he returned to Equistar this spring to work on his second co-op assignment, dealing with gas phase polymerization processing. More

Chemical Engineering Students Tackle Orchard Irrigation Project on Western Slope

Dr. Gary Andrew, right, gives students a tour of the Excelsior Organic Orchard and surrounding area where the irrigation project will assist in fruit production.

Three Chemical Engineering seniors are putting their technical skills and knowledge to use in an organic orchard over the Continental Divide in beautiful Paonia, Colorado. Dr. Gary Andrew, owner of the Excelsior Organic Orchard and former vice chancellor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, had approached Professor David Clough with a problem he faced in automating the irrigation of his 126-acre orchard.

Professor Clough advertised the project to the chemical engineering senior class in the fall of 2000, and students Lee Halevi, Aaron Locander, and Stephanie Thompson-Grieshaber were selected as the project team. Clough and the team traveled to Paonia in late September to visit "Doc" Andrew at the Excelsior Orchard and gather preliminary data for the project. The team then developed a computer simulation of the irrigation system using the Matlab/Simulink software package, in conjunction with their course in Numerical Methods for Process Simulation. More