2025 AIChE Annual Meeting

(96b) Multiple Ways to Teach Process Safety Using a Process Safety Framework.

Author

Tracy Carter - Presenter, Northeastern University
Designing and evaluating processes through the lens of process safety is an essential engineering skill. The consequences of not doing this impacts not only workers in a company, but the business, the business sector, the environment and the public as evidence by the number of significant incidents that have happened in the past. Process safety skills need to be taught at all levels of engineering. The challenge is in the implementation. A process safety framework helps scaffold learning and enables multiple courses to be developed.
The process safety framework consists of four questions. Why is process safety important? What are the hazards? What are the risks? How can the hazard be eliminated or the risk reduced?
Using this framework, process safety can be taught in multiple ways. First process safety can be embedded in the current curriculum, using the framework as a structure to scaffold the learning outcomes throughout the core chemical engineering curriculum. Another method is to teach process safety to first/second year engineers through stories of incidents and then analyzing the incidents through the lens of the framework. For fourth year engineers and graduate students, the framework can be used to structure learning around single or multiple hazards (toxicity, flammability, reactivity) or specific industrial applications (sustainability, pharmaceutical and biotechnology, computational modeling).
Several examples will be provided along with the resources used to implement these learning outcomes and courses as well as the methods to assess learning.