INTEGRATION OF INDUSTRIAL HYGIENE AND SAFETY IN EXPERIMENTAL SUBJECTS OF CHEMICAL ENGINEERING DEGREE

In the current professional and industrial context, training in occupational risks is essential in any working field. Specifically, Chemical Engineers, according to the characteristics of plants and processes of their professional work, must have adequate training in Industrial Safety. In order to achieve a deep learning including this discipline, students have to incorporate safety progressively in their laboratory tasks. The Department of Chemical and Nuclear Engineering at the "Universitat Politècnica de València” is conducting a Teaching Innovation Project for integrating industrial health and safety in experimental subjects of Chemical Engineering degree, based on previous experience on safety teaching (Arnal et al., 2009).

In this educational project, safety training will be developed through procedures similar to those performed on a professional level, in order to motivate students towards identifying occupational risks. Safety will be integrated through the three subjects of Chemical Engineering Experimentation of the Chemical Engineering Degree. This will be done progressively, from the first experimental subject, which is taught in the 2nd year, until the last experimental subject in the 2nd semester of the third year. Thus, each subject will be used to introduce activities related to safety progressively, adapted to the level of complexity of each subject and to the educational level of the students. Moreover, it will be an important coordination task between staff teaching of these subjects in order to establish the contents and assess the results achieved by the groups at the end of each subject and before the beginning of the next one.

This paper describes the methodology of the teaching project, and the main tasks planned at each stage. In addition, we present and describe the activities undertaken to date in the context of the Innovation Project.