DuPont has had a long and successful relationship with Queen’s and has, over the years, presented a series of lectures on Process Safety Management (PSM) at the university.

For the past two years, however, DuPont has held a PSM workshop at their Maydown plant in Derry for the students.

The workshop is an important part of the module which aims to provide the students with an awareness of the safe design and operation of chemical process plants. The module covers topics such as the design of pressure vessels to meet relevant safety standards, hazard analysis of chemical processes and safe working practices in chemical plants.

The DuPont workshop provides the students with an opportunity to tour the Kevlar® manufacturing facility and see how chemical engineering theory is applied in industry. It also gives the students a chance to work with engineers on a real-life case study.

This year the workshop was focused on the BP Texas City Refinery explosion and fire which took place in 2005. As part of the workshop, the students were asked to study the reports of the incident and list the factors that contributed to the event, identify the PSM elements that failed and to list the key learnings and observations from it.

Nineteen Queens second-year Chemical Engineering Students attended the workshop along with two of their lecturers.

The course was facilitated by Tom Bollaert, DuPont Maydown’s Kevlar Unit Manager; Fahed Fallaha, Kevlar Technology Manager at the DuPont Maydown plant, Colin McBride, a chemical engineer who is the Technology Resource and PSM Leader at the DuPont Maydown plant and Gavin Toner, a Queens Chemical Engineering placement student at DuPont.