(55u) Building Process Safety Intelligence: What Should Every Graduating Chemical Engineer Know?

Process safety intelligence is derived from derived from a vast corpus of sources - including textbooks, handbooks, journals, conferences, incident reports, safety datasheets, and available materials and thermophysical property data. Dedicated decision-support tools enabling practitioners to harness this intelligence in their daily work, such as Knovel are an important component of chemical engineering practice today. However, many students don’t realize the breadth and depth of technical knowledge needed to support process design and safety – they tend to overrely on non-specialist search, and miss pedigreed information available on specialized knowledge platforms, such as Knovel.

The undergraduate engineering space offers an excellent opportunity to plant the foundational information seeking behaviors in future process safety professionals and leaders. Knovel focuses on applied a preview of the types of insight they will be forced to leverage in industry careers, without a direct cost to students and faculty.