Ole Miss AIChE Team Heads to Nationals With Carbon Capture Cube

The Ole Miss AIChE team has built a 1-cubic-foot device this fall that is designed to capture carbon dioxide from the air. Their concept made it through an initial round of judging in the spring, and they plan to take it to the ChemECube competition, set for Nov. 2-3 at the annual AIChE student conference in Boston.

Led by Olivia Marque, a senior chemical engineering major from New Orleans, the team suggested an innovative approach integrating an ionic salt.

"This compound is solid at room temperature, and the team is dissolving the compound, then bonding it to the packing material in their tower," Marque said. "We're doing it in a way that's never been done before."

The team's novel approach captured the judges' curiosity and helped the team beat out several larger engineering schools to land a spot in the finals, she said.

"The chemistry proves that it should work," Marque said. "We've been able to test it in a lab, and I would say the test trials have been promising. Post-competition should give us some more solid numbers.

"It's unique, and it's innovative."

The national organization announced the problem for this year's competition in January. The challenge involves designing a safe and cost-effective way to capture carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere.

"Our approach builds on a well-established carbon capture method using sodium hydroxide," Marque said. "The hard thing about capturing carbon is that there's a small amount of carbon in the atmosphere. You're talking about little, tiny particles that you're trying to capture.

"To increase the amount you're capturing is difficult because it's so little when you're talking about the rest of the air that you're pulling in."

Carbon capture is an increasingly important focus in the chemical industry because of concerns about climate change and emissions, said Mike Gill, professor of practice at the university's Center for Manufacturing Excellence and the chapter's faculty adviser.

"The students can't simply do a few calculations and ask a professor to check their answers," he said. "The only answers are what the students discover through applied theory, creativity, and trial and error."

Teams pitched their proposed solutions to a "shark tank" panel of judges at the end of April. Only 23 of the initial 54 teams made it through the presentation round, Gill said.

"Some of the finest engineering schools worldwide are represented, and some of last year's finalists did not make it past the first round this year," he said.

Ole Miss had an AIChE chapter for decades, but the group became inactive during the COVID-19 shutdown. Gill approached Marque last year about reviving the chapter.

"This past year was all about revamping the club and bringing it back," said Marque, who served as the organization's president for the 2024-25 academic year.

At the November competition, teams must present and demonstrate their box, and it must successfully perform the function for which it was designed.

Besides Marque, the competition team includes seniors Vivian Tran, of Natchez; Sam Giarrusso, of Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Britt Reichle, of Greenwood; and Joseph Fallon, of Great Falls, Virginia, and junior Elisabeth Miller, of Corpus Christi, Texas.

The team completed the cube recently and is preparing to ship it to Boston. They raised enough funds to cover the costs of building the device and traveling to the competition.

Working with the team has been a valuable experience, Giarrusso said.

"To qualify for the competition, we had to make the judges believe that we were a team with potential to do something greater than the other schools that had presented," he said. "With all of this in mind, I can confidently say that I have progressed as an engineer since we took on this project."

Gill expects the Ole Miss team to fare well on the national stage.

"This competition is more than technical," he said. "There are business, financial and marketing components to it as well. This is where Ole Miss chemical engineers tend to shine.

"We train these young engineers to be attentive to details, but not to get so focused on them that they lose sight of the big picture."

No matter how the team fares in Boston, the competition will give them an edge after graduation, he said.

"When any member of the team walks a corporate recruiter through this process, a job offer is likely to follow," Gill said.

Top: Sam Giarrusso (right), a senior chemical engineering major, pours an ionic salt solution into the device designed by members of the Ole Miss American Institute of Chemical Engineers team for the ChemECube competition in Boston. Assisting in the work are (from left) team members Britt Reichle, Vivian Tran and Olivia Marque. Photo by Hunt Mercier/Ole Miss Digital Imaging Services