Chemical Engineering in Germany

Advanced Design project 2026

Chemical engineering seniors culminated their Rose-Hulman curriculum with a course that traded campus for another country. The students traveled to Germany for the Advanced Design Project, a two-week intensive design course that enabled them to work alongside a Germany company, Röhm.

As an alternative to the final senior design course, the student teams designed a model of a chemical production facility for Röhm, including absorption and distillation columns, heat integration and the heat exchanger network, cost estimation, and a safety study. Their designs also included a reactor incorporating 25 different reactions.

"In Design I and Design II, we did each piece individually," said 2026 chemical engineering and biochemistry & molecular biology graduate J.B. King. "You could see that it would all come together, but it didn't really click until we did it in the two-week course."

Working in tandem with students from German colleges TU Darmstadt and Provadis University of Applied Sciences Frankfurt-Höchst, as well as South Dakota School of Mines & Technology, the project teams set to work, overcoming language and cultural differences as they developed their design.

"If you're doing a language class, a lot of times we'll focus on day-to-day conversation," King said. "But when it comes down to very work-specific things and you only hear about those things in your highly technical class…it can be very hard to sometimes find the right words for that."

The teams quickly fell into a routine, beginning each morning with breakfast at their hostel. When they arrived at their classroom, the students were briefed on the day's goals before diving into their projects for the next several hours.

At the end of the day, they gathered to present their progress before exploring the culinary offerings of Darmstadt.

As the course concluded, Röhm, the project's industry partner, welcomed the class on a tour of the manufacturing facility in Worms — one of the company's largest plants worldwide — including the research and development department. There, the students were enthralled by the reactor they had so diligently modeled and the orange glow of its reactions.

After presenting their final projects to Röhm (and celebrating with a class pizza party), the students explored the locale before returning to campus.

As a group, they embarked on excursions to Heidelberg and Burg Frankenstein, with several students voyaging to Amsterdam, the Swiss Alps, and Strasbourg, France, on their free days.

The course visited several sites, including castles and cathedrals, in Heidelberg and Burg Frankenstein. They also visited the German Gemstone Museum in Idar-Oberstein, a dream of 2026 graduate Trey Housand.

King, who will begin his career with the Department of Energy after graduation, noted that the course prepared him well for international collaborations.

"Getting to go over there and work with them prepares me for potential cooperative projects in the future," he said. "Any experience where we were working with people from different backgrounds really helps you learn how to act as a bridge in that manner."