(339c) A SaChE Module Designed to Bridge Process Safety's Troubled Waters: Meeting the New Academic Process Safety Requirements

Fatalities, such as those which occurred at the T2 Laboratory in 2007, could have been avoided with better understanding and implementation of the twelve elements of Process Safety Management (PSM). Applications of the PSM elements have made significant advances in industry over the past three decades to help engineers reduce process safety risks with better tools for understanding, analyzing, designing and controlling hazardous processes. The concepts of conservation of mass and energy are complemented with the process safety management concept of conservation of life. This paper describes a new SaChE module which has been created to help bridge part of the process safety-related awareness and education gap between academia and industry. The module provides a framework for organizing the SaChE products, combining the requirements of the senior design project with process hazards analysis principles which drive successful industrial PSM programs. Instructors and students can use this module to improve their awareness of the PSM-related resources and techniques, with particular emphasis on locating the SaChE products that have been designed to be integrated within the chemical engineering curriculum. Use of this module will help ensure that students graduate with, at minimum, an awareness of different hazards analysis techniques that must be used when they design their risk reduction controls, preventing irreversible life-changing process-related incidents from affecting them or their co-workers.