Handling Hazardous Materials: The integration of chemical concepts with practical applications in the industrial workplace for engineering and science majors

摘要

The Chemistry discipline at Kettering University offers CHEM-271, Handling Hazardous Materials, as an elective for both science and engineering majors. The prerequisites for this course are two terms of chemistry one of which must contain fundamentals of organic chemistry. The topics covered by this course are not found in any other elective course taken by students at Kettering University. Since this course is not a prerequisite for any other course offered at Kettering University, the coverage of the course varies from term to term depending upon the make of the student body in the class and the students' interests. The textbook used in the course is Chemical Process Safety, Fundamental with Applications by Crowl and Louvar. Since Kettering University does not offer a chemical engineering degree, only certain portions of the text are used. Topics that are typically covered include: 1) Review of inorganic and organic chemical principles; 2) Toxicology; 3) Industrial hygiene; 4) Toxic release and dispersion models; 5) Fires and explosions; 6) Inerting; 7) Static electricity; 8) Risk and risk analysis; 9) Accidents and their investigations. The first portion of the course is a review of basic inorganic and organic chemistry. This is necessary because most of the students in the class are juniors or seniors and have not directly used chemical principles for two or three years. This review is based on practical applications of fundamental chemistry to real-world problems. Once this review is finished, various chapters from the textbook are covered. What follows are several examples of questions that are representative of those used in the course to apply chemical principles to various topics in the course.