Explosion.

The rare engineering post makes an appearance on my blog.  

Derek Lowe points to an summary in Chemical and Engineering News (a trade magazine of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers) of a tragic but interesting 2007 chemical plant explosion.  I clicked over to the full report to fill in some of the details for myself.

I was amused to read some of the responses on Derek's blog (he seems to think that part of the problem was that the operators "only" had undergraduate degrees — sorry, but it's a rare PhD or Master's program that covers process controls in the kind of practical detail needed to prevent this kind of explosion) but also interested to read (in the full report, not the summary) that the Chemical Safety & Hazard Investigation Board recommended that undergraduate chemical engineering education be modified to add "reactivity hazard awareness" to the curriculum.

That got me thinking — what aspects of reactivity hazard awareness belong in an undergraduate curriculum? There's the operator's end of the hazard awareness, in which the decision tree ought to be something like, "The temperature's going up — what should I do to stop it — and at what point should I start running?"  And then there's the design end, in which perhaps the most important thing to teach is how to know when you ought to outsource process design to somebody more experienced.

I'd like to get Mark's opinion on this, but I have to go to bed now.