Engineering profession standards

The American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) has a 30-year history of involvement with process safety for chemical processing plants. Through its strong ties with process designers, builders, operators, safety professionals and academia, the AIChE has enhanced communication and fostered improvement in the high safety standards of the industry. AIChE publications and symposia have become an information resource for the chemical engineering profession on the causes of accidents and means of prevention. 

The four most cited accidents (Flixborough, England Bhopal, India Seveso, Italy and Pasadena, Texas) are presented here. All these accidents had a significant impact on public perceptions and the chemical engineering profession that added new emphasis and standards in the practice of safety. Chapter 13 presents case histories in considerably more detail. 

Although the safe design practices recommended by professional and trade associations have no legal standing where they have not actually been incorporated in a body of law, many of them have the respect and confidence of the engineering profession as a whole and have been accepted by insurance underwriters so they are widely observed. Even when they are only voluntary, standards constitute a digest of experience that represents a minimum requirement of good practice. 

The exercises are an intentionally well-mixed bag. They range from simple applications of equations and concepts developed in the text to relatively open-ended situations that may require arbitrary judgement and, in some instances, have no unique answer. The units employed are equally well-mixed. Historically, multiple systems of measure have been a curse of the engineering profession and such is the case here particularly, where we range from the scientific purity of Planck s constant to the ultimate practicality of a barrel of oil. The SI system will eventually provide standardization, it is to be hoped, but this is not a short-term proposition. Because both author and reader must continue to cope with diverse sets of units, no attempt at standardization has been made here. 

Why is the engineering profession important to our country s economic competitiveness and our standard of living ... 

This Statement of Ethical Principles sets a standard to which members of the engineering profession should aspire in their working habits and relationships. The Statement is fully compatible with the principles in the UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser s Universal Ethical Code for Scientists, with an emphasis on matters of particular relevance to engineers. The values on which it is based should apply in every situation in which professional engineers exercise their judgement. 

These definitions are set by the Engineering Council (EngC), the UK regulatory body for the engineering profession, which also sets the benchmark standards that govern professional registration and holds the... 

We must take up the complex question of what constitutes human welfare, and we will need tools such as everyday ethics in order to have such a conversation. This is because the shaping and communication of engineering values happens both implicitly and explicitly, and these values can be invoked and inculcated in contradictory ways. The engineering profession may encourage certain values, for example, even if it does not insist upon them in explicit codes of ethics. Possible examples include eco-skepticism as discussed by Didier and Talin in Chap. 12, and the effects of climate change on the standards used in planning and building nuclear power plants by Schneider, Tidwell, and Fitzwater in Chap. 15. 

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