Dr Antonio del Rio Chanona presented the second technical talk of the year titled “Artificial Intelligence in Chemical Engineering” on Tuesday 9 December 2020. Antonio gave an overview and opportunities of artificial intelligence in chemical and biochemical process industries. He showed, using examples, how data and artificial intelligence can be used in chemical engineering and how it can be applied in different areas like process design and control. Antonio is currently Assistant Professor and director of the Optimisation and Machine Learning for Process Systems Engineering Lab at Imperial College London.

The current president of IChemE, Professor Stephen Richardson, delivered the last technical talk of the year “Piper Alpha and other accidents I have investigated” on 18th December 2020 during the traditional Christmas Lecture. Stephen has investigated a number of accidents, most notably Piper Alpha, for which he was a member of the Public Inquiry under Lord Cullen, and also Umm Said, Ocean Odyssey, Longford, P36 Roncador and several others. In this talk, He mentioned some key features of the Piper Alpha accident, in which 167 men tragically died. Specifically, He described the chronology of the accident and what went wrong, why it had such disastrous consequences and what lessons can (still) be learned.

The Christmas Lecture ended with announcement of the winners of the article competition. The theme of the competition was “How is Chemical Engineering addressing a global issue?”. Congratulations to the winners!

• 1st Place: Elan Mistry,
• 2nd Place: Brant Walkley
• 3rd Place: Eduardo Garciadiego-Ortega.

The winning entry can be found in the 2021 edition of IChemE LSEC Newsletter.