(149c) Process Safety Instructional Enhancements Implemented in a Two-Semester Chemical Process Design Course

An ABET review of our chemical engineering program in the first year of the author’s teaching appointment at Texas A&M University-Kingsville (TAMUK) spurred a comment regarding the need for greater process safety instruction in our curriculum. Our department faculty indicated this instruction would best fit into both the unit operations laboratory two-course sequence and the chemical process design two-course sequence. The author, who is the instructor for the chemical process design course sequence, has, over the last two years, incrementally developed and presented new units on chemical process safety for both of the design courses. The emphasis of the new units has been on four different areas. The first of these focus areas is identifying and understanding reactivity, flammability, and toxicity hazards of the chemicals studied in various course design problems, including the group-focused senior design project in the second course. The second focus area is risk-based process safety management systems commonly implemented by refinery and chemical process corporations. The third focus area is on review and analysis of actual chemical accidents, such as through event reconstruction videos provided by the Chemical Safety Board. The fourth focus area is on understanding and creating HAZOPs tables for limited portions of the process each group is developing for their senior design project. Students are evaluated on their understanding of this material using quizzes in the second design course, as well as on the extent to which these principles are included in their senior project chemical process design. The author uses material obtained at the CCPS Faculty Workshop on Chemical Process Safety from June 2016, as well as material from Crowley and Louvar’s Chemical Process Safety text and Turton’s Analysis, Synthesis and Design of Chemical Processes text, to develop these instructional units. This paper focuses on presenting the methods used for instruction and the successes and challenges indicated by student work in grasping this course material over the prior two years of chemical process design courses at TAMUK.