A team of five Chemical Engineering students from the University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC) has won a national Third Prize in the 2026 "Tianzheng Design Cup" 20th National Chemical Engineering Design Competition for College Students. Competing against 4,690 teams from 503 universities across China, the team—named "Yi Ren Wei Ben"—had earlier won a Second Prize in the Zhejiang provincial round and a First Prize in the East China regional round. It was UNNC's first time entering the competition.
A new route, scaled up
This year's brief was to design a clean styrene production plant as a new site for a large chemical company. Rather than adopting the conventional commercial route based on ethylbenzene dehydrogenation, the team chose a newer, cleaner route: side-chain alkylation of toluene with methanol. The method is based on a 2021 paper in the journal Fuel, which reported a composite catalyst that converts toluene and methanol directly to styrene with high selectivitym, avoiding the energy-intensive dehydrogenation step.
However, a reaction that works in the laboratory faces entirely different questions at industrial scale. Is the feedstock supply secure? Can the reaction conditions be reliably maintained in a commercial-scale unit? How can the products be separated efficiently? Is the whole process economically viable?
To address these questions, the team set out to take the technology from "lab-feasible" to "industry-feasible", with a clear division of labour. Boran Yang carried out the full-plant Aspen Plus simulation, followed by heat exchanger network optimisation and energy-saving design. Zimo Mu prepared the process flow diagrams (PFDs) and carried out equipment design checks, while Yuxuan Feng produced the piping and instrumentation diagrams (P&IDs). Once the process and equipment design had been finalised, Sicheng Lai completed the plant layout, and Yuqiao Wang carried out the economic evaluation and safety analysis to assess overall project feasibility.
This was the project's main innovation and its greatest challenge: using a route that has not yet been commercialised to answer a full set of real engineering questions. After completing the simulation, the team further optimised the design by adjusting the recycle loops, separation media and heat exchanger network. The final design has a capacity of 150,000 tonnes of styrene per year at 99.7% purity, and meets clean production goals across energy consumption, raw material utilisation, carbon emissions and economic performance.
Balancing research, study and competition
The team—Zimo Mu, Boran Yang, Yuxuan Feng, Sicheng Lai and Yuqiao Wang, all studying Chemical Engineering—formed in the second semester of their second year. They discovered the competition on their own initiative, organised themselves into a team and approached several academic staff for guidance.
Their preparation began amid the pressure of a normal semester. While keeping up with coursework, they had to teach themselves much of what the competition demanded—from process simulation software and equipment selection and sizing to economic analysis and safety assessment—devoting much of their time outside class to evaluating design options and running simulations.
The summer brought no let-up. Some team members stayed on campus for undergraduate research placements in the Faculty, while others took up summer research assistant roles at the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Balancing research internships with competition work became the norm: days spent running experiments and processing data, evenings spent online with teammates discussing process parameters and revising the design.
Over almost five months of preparation, the team went through two rounds of feedback and revision—first at the provincial competition, then at the East China regional round. After each defence, they reworked their design in light of the judges' comments—adjusting recycle loops, optimising separation media and refining the heat exchanger network. The team finalised its design in mid-August and then prepared for the defence at the national final.
Reflecting on the experience, team leader Zimo Mu said the competition covered most of what a final-year design project would involve, with every member contributing to information gathering, material and energy balance calculations and design decisions. "It gave us a chance to see chemical engineering design as a whole, and to understand the specific process from a whole-plant perspective."
Academic guidance throughout the competition
The project would not have been possible without the sustained guidance and support of Dr Lionel O'Young, Dr Kien Woh Kow and Dr Zeping Wang.
Dr O'Young, who brings decades of chemical industry experience, helped the team debug and complete the Aspen simulation, brought their drawings up to professional engineering standard and used real industrial cases to make abstract engineering concepts concrete. "Beyond the prize, what matters more is that they have begun to think like engineers—weighing safety, energy consumption, equipment and economics together," he said.
The prize is one outcome of this journey, but the engineering thinking, the ability to solve complex problems and the teamwork developed along the way are even more valuable. Looking ahead, the team members will carry this experience with them as they continue to explore how ideas can become reality in chemistry and engineering.