(516a) Process Safety Education: Moving Beyond the Obvious

By the time engineering students get to college, they will likely have had some exposure to safety requirements of some sort including in a laboratory environment. Many times such safety requirements would be framed as a series of “do/do not” rules provided by an authority to the participants. This authority/participant paradigm may go uninterrupted during higher education, and it is certainly reiterated by regulatory requirements for companies. Many organizations have pushed past this authority/participant paradigm by recognizing that provisions such as regulatory requirements, while necessary to meet, could fall short of desired outcomes. One such framework for moving beyond the obvious regulatory requirements is the Risk Based Process Safety framework developed by the Center for Chemical Process Safety. In our required process safety course at the University of Arkansas, we attempt to move beyond the standard subjects one might find in such a course. We discuss three separate examples. The material in the course places an emphasis on the importance of safety culture including the importance of equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI or similarly AIChE’s IDEAL). This material moves beyond the obvious by making the case that the practice of equity, diversity and inclusion actually increases productivity and quality of work including research. When considering the topic of atmospheric dispersion, the course introduces the students to the use of the ALOHA, which is the atmospheric dispersion model used by first responders. This material moves beyond the obvious use of air modeling to meet regulatory requirements and brings to light that such models can be used to determine evacuation zones. Finally, the course shows students how to make estimates of flashing-two phase flow release rates in consequence assessments using ASPEN. This material moves beyond the oft cited use of the Clausius-Clapeyron equation which cannot be used for mixtures and has been shown to not compare well with experimental data even for pure components. This material also makes the point that simply checking the box of making estimates with tools that are known to be faulty is professionally unacceptable. Taken together, the course makes the case for moving beyond only looking to authority but being a self-aware, active participant in chemical process safety.