UniMelb wins Pratt Prize for second year running

A team of University of Melbourne students has won the Pratt Prize for its design of a facility to treat coal seam gas as feed for an LNG facility. This is the second year in a row that the University of Melbourne team has won the prize.

The Pratt Prize is coordinated by the Joint Victorian Chemical Engineering Committee (JVCEC), with the winner automatically qualifying for the BOC Design Prize, which is presented at Chemeca 2013. According to the Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE), the Pratt Prize has become a ‘rite of passage’ for final-year Victorian chemical engineering students.

Leon Prentice, IChemE Chartered Member and lead judge, said the quality of entrants was excellent and the decision was very close.

“The winning entry was particularly excellent in its approach to calculation methodology, combining computer modelling with first-principles calculations,” Prentice said. “Overall structure and cohesion of the reports were also important, with the overall goal being to write something that could be presented to a potential client.”

The winning team included: Sarah Cerchi, Jeffrey Khor, Elanor Kloester, Stephanie Lynch and Katherine Papadakis. Teams from RMIT and Monash University were runners-up.

Prizes were presented by IChemE Fellow Robert Pratt, son of Clive Pratt, and the event was supported by ExxonMobil.