Program Overview

In 1995, Texas A&M University formed the Mary Kay O’Connor Process Safety Center, an industrially-sponsored Center of Excellence to produce students trained in process safety and to provide its member firms with the research base needed to compete successfully in the rapidly growing chemical processing industry. By 1995, worldwide annual sales in that industry exceeded $1 trillion. With bright prospects for continued growth in the industry, great opportunities exist for companies that keep abreast of technological progress.

It is against this backdrop that the Center seeks to further the technology, methodologies, and research to improve the overall understanding of process safety issues. The Center’s charter is to broaden the scientific and engineering knowledge base of the industry and to educate engineers and scientists in the field while striving to achieve the technology breakthroughs necessary to reach ambitious, long-term, engineering goals. Its mission includes bringing together researchers from diverse industrial, academic, and government laboratories whose work can contribute to the future development of process safety issues which have far reaching impact upon the chemical processing industry. The Center also has the responsibility of outreach to the industry, to other universities and educational institutions, and to the public as a whole. Without question, the Center has the most unique combination of academic, research, training and service efforts launched in the field of process safety in the United States, and possibly the world.

The main areas of research at the Center are emergency relief systems, reactive systems, runaway reactions, inherently safer design, equipment reliability and development of reliability databases, and development of incident databases. The research program is divided into four major areas: design; human reliability and human factors engineering; equipment reliability; and new technologies. Projects are focused, but span a wide range, and researchers at the Center include certified safety professionals in industrial hygiene, ergonomics, health physics, occupational medicine, industrial psychology, fire protection, and professional engineers with plant design, operations, maintenance, and safety expertise. The aggressive but achievable goals of the Center inspire and excite not only Center researchers, but also those from industry who participate with us.