Closing the Gap between Process Engineering and Safety with a Safety-Focused Master’s Degree

In the industrial practice, safety is a top priority for process engineers however, this is not typically the case in education programs for chemical and process engineers. At some universities process engineers graduate having heard little or even nothing about process safety. Consequently, in their professional lives they have two options to tackle process safety issues: training on-the-job or leaving process safety issues entirely to specialists or external consultants.

Health, safety, and environmental (HSE) specialists manage a range of topics including occupational safety and health, hazardous materials management, environmental protection, and legal compliance. Hence, HSE managers have to be all-rounders with a solid engineering background, but inevitably they will have limited knowledge concerning the work of the process engineers.

To bridge the gap between the process engineer and HSE manager, the Otto-von-Guericke University in Magdeburg, Germany introduced the Process Safety and Environmental Engineering (PSEE) master program in 2016. Students from around the world with a bachelor degree in chemical or process engineering receive training in the natural scientific fundamentals of technical processes, especially those related to safety and environment so that they can think and act holistically in the assessment of safety and environmental concerns and their prevention and mitigation.

This contribution discusses the role of safety in process development and if there is an “optimal” level of safety training for process engineers. The PSEE curricula is compared to other concepts for educating process engineers in safety and examples of teaching activities that incorporate safety analysis into process engineering activities are shown.