Reflections on embedding safety throughout the process engineering program

Safety is an important part of being a well-rounded, responsible process engineer. It not only covers fundamental scientific knowledge but also a way of thinking and culture in how engineers approach their work, and is continually developed throughout the working life of a process engineer. However, how this safety learning can start to be imparted to engineering students in an academic environment is a challenge for educators. In this work the systems approach that has been taken as part of UCL's Integrated Engineering Program (IEP) teaching framework is examined. Within this framework, safety is embedded into the curriculum from the start in Year 1 and is continually extended and advanced throughout the process engineering program. As the first cohort of students graduate we reflect on how this has been implemented and received

A system-theoretic, control-inspired view and approach to process safety

Accidents in the process industry continue to occur, and we do not seem to be making much progress in reducing them (Venkatasubramanian, 2011). Postmortem analysis has indicated that they were preventable and had similar systemic causes (Kletz, 2003). Why do we fail to learn from the past and make adequate changes to prevent their reappearance? A variety of explanations have been offered; operators' faults, component failures, lax supervision of operations, poor maintenance, etc. All of these explanations, and many others, have been exhaustively studied, analyzed, “systematized” into causal groups, and a variety of approaches have been developed to address them. Even so, they still occur with significant numbers of fatalities and injured people, with significant disruption of productive operations and frequently extensive destruction of the surrounding environment, both physical and social