Chao Yung-kang (senior, Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering) won the champion of 2006~2007 National Collegiate Programming Contest held by Taiwan Institute of Chemical Engineers. By beating other contestants from colleges around Taiwan, Chao won not only the title but also 50-thousand-NT dollars. His classmates, Yu Chiu-hsia, Chen Hui-wen and Wu Tu-te also teamed up and won the third place as well as 20-thousand-dollar prize in the contest.

The topic of Chao’s research is titled, “Design of an Acetic Acid Aqueous Solution Recovery Process,” and he deploys this project to demonstrate what he has learned in the past four years. He indicated that he studied very hard in the classroom, and when he met some problems, he would look them up in books. The Programming Contest put its emphasis on training contestants on how to utilize professional knowledge, creative thinking, as well as teamwork, presentation and communication ability. These qualities are all extremely important for an engineer-to-be. Thus, he has learned a great deal during the competition. However, Chao also paid the price. Since he spent all the time on programming, he suffered from blood stool and diagnosed with gastric bleeding. But all sufferings have their rewards.

Chang Hsuan, the associate professor who supervised Chao’s project, pointed out that acetic acid is a chemical that widely used in chemical engineering. During the process the waste water will be generated. But if the waste water can be recycled, it can not only reduce the waste but also increase the profit of the acetic acid products. Therefore, Chao’s programming is really practical. He believed that the reason why TKU students can have great performance in the contest is because of two reasons: firstly, TKU provides the cutting edge software ASPEN for simulating the programming in training students; secondly, and more importantly, the hard work of the students.

Chao has devoted much time and energy to absorbing the programming methods quickly taught in the course. He used them wisely in his project, and wrote an in-depth and overall report on it in the end. For these efforts, the judges give him very high credit and praise him with the following comments, “The design almost reaches professional standard.”

Yu Chiu-hsia, one of the winners of the third prize, declared that she chose the topic “Recycling the industrial waste contains acetic acid through the process of extraction and distillation” for personal interest. It is a great experience that she underwent the whole competition which led to her deeper understand of process programming. ( ~Chen Chi-szu )