Integration of Process Safety in Chemical Process Design: Initiating a Different Way of Thinking

Teaching process safety in Engineering curriculum in general and in Chemical Engineering curriculum in particular is becoming more crucial, giving the worldwide advancement and developments in process industries. Courses on chemical process safety usually involve, but are not limited to, the application of different principles and fundamentals studied in engineering courses (from mathematics and statistics up to transport phenomena and process design) to process safety. This paper discusses the experience gained from teaching chemical process safety courses to the senior students in chemical engineering department at Texas A&M University at Qatar (TAMU-Qatar). Significant efforts have been made to develop teaching programs supported by key activities and the use of relevant experimental facilities to improve the quality of the teaching and transmit Safety and Process Safety as a value to the students. Process design final year project is considered as an excellent opportunity for the students to apply the principles of process safety to their process design. For this particular activity the students are encouraged to thinking a different way beyond the achievement of predefined design goals and assess the risks associated to abnormal working conditions (operation under severe condition, loss of control, etc) and reduce these risks by application of the principles of inherent safety, and the addition of prevention and mitigation measures. In other words, the challenge lies in getting the student to switch from focusing only on the process design goals to integrating different process safety concepts during solving different design problems at early stages of the project.