Honeywell is reminding technical students in colleges and universities across the world to submit their abstracts for the annual Honeywell students' competition. Students are invited to propose ideas on ways to advance innovation in the process automation industry.

A committee made up of experts in the field will select three winners - one for each global region - who together with their sponsoring tutor will receive an expenses-paid trip to the Honeywell Users' Group 2012 Conference (HUG) in their region (Americas, Asia-Pacific or Europe-Middle East-Africa), where they will present their winning project.

"Student competitions such as this serve two critical purposes," said Darius Adamczyk, president of Honeywell Process Solutions. "First, they bring fresh thinking that help solve real problems faced by real manufacturing facilities. And second, they show the innovators of tomorrow how they can put their engineering skills to use in the real world, strengthening our future workforce."

Competition details: Economic pressures call for fresh and imaginative ways of thinking within the process automation industry. Improving efficiency, productivity, reliability, safety and sustainability are key issues engineers need to consider when developing innovative and unique ways of using day-to-day tools.

With this in mind, students are invited to demonstrate their creativity by using the Honeywell UniSim? Design Suite software to create a process design aimed at solving a critical plant business issue. UniSim Design Suite is an intuitive and interactive process model, offering talented engineers the ability to create steady-state and dynamic models for plant design, performance monitoring, troubleshooting, operational improvement, business planning, and asset management.

Prize: Three winners will be announced; one from each region. Each winner and their research advisor will be invited to present their design at the 2012 Honeywell Users' Group Conference in their region: Americas (Phoenix, June 10-15), Asia-Pacific (Gold Coast, Australia, August 5-9) or EMEA (Istanbul, Turkey, November 13-16). Honeywell will cover travel, accommodation and registration costs. The sponsoring tutor will also have the chance to attend a highly in-depth and informative training course at one of Honeywell's automation colleges.

Submissions and deadline: Abstracts detailing the benefits derived from the design, of approximately 300 words in length, accompanied with a short presentation, should be submitted by the following deadlines:

• Americas: 4 May 2012
• Asia-Pacific: 30 April 2012,a nd
• EMEA: 30 August 2012

Previous winners include:

• Miroslav Pajic and Harsh Jain from the University of Pennsylvania, for wireless sensor-actuator-controller (WSAC) networks as a single solution to monitor and operate automation systems to lower installation and maintenance costs
• Rajab Khalilpour from the University of Sydney, for the simulation and optimization of a coal-fired power plant using a solvent-based post-combustion carbon capture process, to capture up to 90% of the CO2 emitted from coal power plants using reactive absorbents, and
• Igor Krylov from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, on the use of UniSim? Design-based simulation to verify findings achieved using first principles modeling. The results may be incorporated into new alarm technology for real ammonia production facilities.

For more information and details on conditions of entry, please visit unisim.studentcompetitions.com. Sample entries and last year's winners can be found at www.facebook.com/HoneywellStudentEngineers.