CHEMICAL AND PROCESS SAFETY FOR DEVELOPMENT CHEMISTS

Chemical process safety incidents can be very different in nature, going from bulging reagent drums waiting to burst, over limited spills in the lab due to sudden gas release, to catastrophic runaway reactions in the plant. They mostly have one thing in common: understanding the interplay between the chemistry involved and the physical consequences could have prevented them.

In this course, the basics of chemical process safety are explained, always starting from the underlying chemistry. A lot of emphasis will be put on heat and gas evolution, how they affect the inherent process safety and how they can be measured in the lab. Basic scale-up calculations for both gas and heat evolution will be explained using examples and exercises. Guidelines will be given to prevent possible issues with heat transfer at larger scale. The importance of stability data of chemicals, reaction mixtures and products will be explained, together with different tools to determine them experimentally. Background will be provided to understand and interpret the results of reaction calorimetry and thermal stability experiments. Safety aspects of upstream or downstream processes like storage and waste streams will be discussed. The safety benefits of flow chemistry will be explained, and the specific safety evaluation needed for such flow processes will be explored as well.

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Speakers: Dr Wim Dermaut