Incorporating chemical process safety education into a chemical engineering curriculum using the four categories of change strategies model
Permanent URL:
http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20294147
West, Richard (Committee member)
Webster, Thomas (Committee member)
Crowl, Daniel (Committee member)
The goal of this dissertation is to integrate process safety across the Northeastern University (NEU) Chemical Engineering (ChmE) curriculum to address these needs and minimize these risks. Failing to include mandated process safety in the curriculum can influence an ABET accreditation for a university program. At a minimum, a program will have to prepare a report addressing a weakness within 3 years and submit an Interim Report (IR), or at the extreme, Not to Accredit (NA).2 This would cause a loss of competitiveness and will result in fewer enrollees in the university. For Northeastern University, this is equivalent to an income stream of $27 million per year. It can cascade over to closer assessments by potential students in other engineering programs as well.
To assist the assessment of the ABET process safety criteria Safety and Chemical Engineering Education (SAChE) Committee 6 in collaboration with faculty and industry leaders in 2010 developed eight outcomes. These eight outcomes include an understanding of past events, the hazards and impacts of chemicals and releases, as well as understanding how to assess the hazards and risks associated with a process and to design or mitigate against them.
Through this dissertation, the NEU ChmE curriculum was updated to include these eight outcomes, integrated across eight core ChmE courses, taught by 13 different instructors. A control group consisted of the Fall 2017 classes in which no curriculum changes were implemented. Then, a test group, with the identical classes offered in the Spring of 2018, implemented the process safety curriculum integration. Student perceptions of their respective skills were measured before and after the redesign. Student skill perceptions increased 25 to 150% across all courses that participated in the Spring 2018 courses as measured by pre-and post-assessments. Their scores on assignments/quizzes/tests that related to process safety needs were also measured and showed that all students scored greater than 3.70.3/4.0 on all reported self-assessments.
The ultimate result of this dissertation is a sustainable process for integrating chemical process safety across the curriculum. Curriculum integration of content is essential due to program credit limits, which limit the number of new core courses that can be added to the curriculum. This process incorporates all SAChE safety outcomes, meets ABET safety requirements, allows any new content to be easily integrated by faculty into the core curriculum and can be implemented for a fraction of the cost of alternatives such as the AIChE Chemical Process Safety Bootcamp.
education
integrated curriculum
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