Christophe PROUST Enseignant-chercheur

Addressing safety issues from emerging technologies in chemical engineering.

Today, it seems that investment, at least in the chemical industry, is not only driven by the expectation of reducing the energy or raw materials consumption but also by the hope of improving the quality, reducing significantly the environmental footprint reduction and improving safety. Safety is firstly defined and set in perspective with past accidents which little by little changed the minds and the regulation in industrialized countries. From this, it is easy to conclude that developing new technologies in chemistry may lead to nowhere if safety (and environmental) concerns are not accounted for from the early beginning. A major difficulty with emerging breakthrough technologies is the absence of any feedback from “past accidents”. Not only the sequences of events leading to an accident need to be imagined from scratch but even the nature of the accident may be unknown.