(232e) Continuing Our Journey to Bridge the Process Safety Gaps Between Academia and Industry

The Safety and Chemical Engineering Education (SaChE) committee was created in 1992, in part, to help provide instructors with practical Chemical Process Safety (CPS)-related teaching materials (aka “products”) from industry.  One of SaChE’s goals is to help instructors who don’t have extensive process safety experience to prepare lessons and to teach CPS to their students.  A stronger emphasis on CPS in the chemical engineering curriculum will help reduce industry’s process safety risk in order to prevent major incidents such as the explosion that occurred at T2 Laboratories.  In conjunction with representatives from industry, the SaChE Committee conducts a workshop where faculty can visit an industrial facility and get hands on experience with the application of process safety principles and practices.  In addition to the faculty workshops, SaChE has worked for many years to provide teaching materials and programs that bring elements of process safety into the classroom.

Currently, the SaChE Committee has overseen the creation of more than 90 different products, the development of the safety certificate program (six certificates are currently available for students to complete), and provided a clearinghouse for many useful links to other resources.  Now that SaChE has established its strong resource base of teaching materials, we believe it is time to enhance the SaChE product’s organizational framework to help instructors more easily locate materials that meet the AIChE/CCPS Process Safety Expectation Guidelines.  The objective of making SaChE materials more accessible to faculty will facilitate the response of academia to the proposed 2011-12 ABET Chemical Engineering Program-Specific Criteria to "address the hazards associated with these processes," as is recommended by AIChE.

This paper discusses a proposed SaChE materials organizational framework that will help meet the new CPS-related instructional requirements.  The goals of this paper include:

      1)   To show how the current CPS products, certificates and links correspond to industry’s Process Safety Management (PSM) efforts,

      2)   To show how these CPS products may be integrated into a typical chemical engineering curriculum, with a specific demonstration of how the SaChE certification program can be incorporated to meet the proposed changes,

      3)   To provide a summary of the latest efforts for organizing and displaying the products, safety certificates (including system “scalability” – i.e., its sustainability) and CPS-related resources into a curriculum-based framework, and

      4)   To provide a curriculum-to-available-SaChE-materials matrix that will help us focus on future SaChE-related efforts and charter teams to create new or update existing products.           

Participants will leave this session with both a better understanding of the strong foundation generated by industrial process safety experts and how the SaChE web-site can help instructors find information more quickly in the future.