<p>Our senior design project at Pitt also involves building a chemical plant...for styrene specifically. Styrene is kind of boring, but we get to charge as much as we want for it in our virtual economy. I'm going to become a virtual billionaire!!! :)</p>
<p>LOL! One of my design projects (actually 2 projects but I can only vaguely remember one) at Northwestern involved processing some feed stream with various chemicals and achieving certain purity (like 99.9% or something insanely high) of one (or two; don't remember exactly) of the chemicals that can be sold for certain $ per weight. We have to consider the economics and watch out the cost (esp energy cost). The goal is to maximize the flow of product with the specified purity (low quantity would make you go bankrupt fast; lower than specified purity violated the primary goal and you could say bye to A and hello to C!). The purity, quantity, and operating cost seemed to work against each other and you have to find that delicate balance to maximum the first two while minimizing the third. So we spent many long nights with the HYSIM! So we weren't as lucky as you in terms of virtue economy. ;)</p>