(299d) Adventures with Incorporating Process Safety Into the Chemical Engineering Curriculum

Until the mid 1980’s process safety was primarily an industrial issue, with almost all of the technology being developed and used by industry.

Due to an industrial summer job in the early 1980’s, the author was introduced to process safety and was convinced that this material must be incorporated into the undergraduate chemical engineering curriculum.  This eventually resulted in a textbook on process safety, several faculty workshops, many instructional modules, a video series, a student certificate program, a ChemE car safety program, and other materials and projects related to process safety.

This paper presents the history of how this happened and also the challenges of bringing a new industrial area into the chemical engineering curriculum.