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STUDY GUIDE · GKU 9

Safety, health and the environment study guide (Chemical Engineering)

Process safety is the engineering of keeping hazardous materials and energy inside the plant. This guide starts with the hazards of the materials themselves, as communicated by safety data sheets, and with the exposure of the people who work with them. It then covers how hazards are found and risks judged (HAZOP, fault trees, layers of protection), how vessels are protected against over- and under-pressure, how waste is minimized, treated and regulated, and how a reaction can run away. The weight of this unit in the exam is small, so each section is short and aimed at the calculations and judgements that are actually asked.

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Structured by the official ETEC subject standard for this topic: every listed topic and learning outcome, with formulas, figures and worked examples. The full sections are available to members in the app.

SKU 9.1 · Process safety

  1. Hazardous properties of materials and safety data sheets

    Flammability (flash point, flammability limits, mixtures), toxicity, corrosivity and reactivity; how the GHS classifies and labels them; what a safety data sheet contains; and what this means for handling, storage and transport.

  2. Industrial hygiene: exposure, noise, PPE and ergonomics

    How workplace exposure to chemicals and noise is evaluated against limits (time-weighted averages, mixtures, noise dose), the hierarchy of controls with PPE as the last line, and the ergonomic hazards of plant work.

  3. Hazard identification, risk assessment and layers of protection

    Finding hazards systematically (checklists, what-if, HAZOP, FMEA), combining failures with fault trees, judging risk as frequency times consequence, and showing with LOPA that enough independent protection layers stand between a cause and its consequence.

  4. Over-pressure and under-pressure protection, redundancy and inherent safety

    Relief valves, rupture discs and vacuum breakers, the scenarios they are sized for, where relief goes, redundant control and safety instrumented systems, and the inherent-safety principles that remove the need for protection in the first place.

  5. Waste minimization, treatment and environmental regulation

    The waste-management hierarchy, minimization at the source, the main treatment routes for air, water and solid wastes, and the US framework the handout names: RCRA for hazardous waste, the Clean Water Act for discharges, other EPA rules and OSHA.

  6. Reactivity hazards: runaway reactions and chemical compatibility

    Why exothermic reactions run away (heat generation against heat removal), the adiabatic temperature rise and the maximum temperature of the synthesis reaction, and incompatibilities between chemicals and between chemicals and materials of construction.

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