1. Industry Background:
In recent years, China has proposed the overall national security outlook and highlighted the concept of general safety. The technology of reactive safety is one of the most complicated technical fields of dangerous chemical safety and chemical engineering process safety technology. Research on reactive safety technology started late in China, and there is still a gap between it and advanced technology in the world. In 2022, China issued the first reactive safety risk evaluation standard, Fine Chemical Reactive Safety Risk Evaluation Norm (GB/T42300-2022), which started the general understanding of the hazard of chemical reactions in the industry and revolutionarily ed the development of China's reactive safety technology. The standard adopted a method to determine the reactive safety risk level based on the condition of failed cooling during the process of intermittent reaction. However, according to the statistical result of 271 accidents caused by out-of-control reactions in chemical engineering processes from 1984 to 2019 in the article written by the team of Professor Liu Yi from China University of Petroleum (East China), the cases of cooling failures only account for 2.6% of the total number of accidents (7 cases, see Table 1). The result is consistent with Barton's (England) statistical result of 187 accidents of out-of-control reactions during the process of intermittent reactions (the cases of cooling failures only account for 3% of the total number of accidents). In addition, many working conditions during plants' production process are more dangerous than cooling failures, such as the most common causes, excessive and excessively fast feeding, wrong feeding, steam valve leakages, external fire hazards, storage and transportation, etc. The chemical engineering process can't be implemented without three deliveries and one reaction, and chemical engineering process safety also involves reliability (equipment, instruments, personnel, etc.). The standard only covers one reaction (the adiabatic hypothesis leads to the neglect of heat transfer). Therefore, there are many places to be completed in the standard applied to the reactive safety risk evaluation in chemical engineering processes. Chemical engineering enterprises urgently need effective technology of reactive security risk evaluation and risk control, and the national defense industry also needs studies of the mechanism of reactive safety to support its research and development of advanced technology. The center will focus on the studies of reactive safety technology and be committed to the development and ion of the full-process reaction hazard analysis (RHA) of chemical engineering processes.
Table 1: Analysis of 271 accidents of out-of-control reactions in 1984-2019 in China
2. Features of the Center:
The former name of the East China University of Science and Technology was East China College of Chemical Engineering. The university is the first higher learning institution that features chemical engineering in the People's Republic of China and a national key university directly subordinate to the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China, with 11 disciplinary classes. It is involved in the lists of National First-class Universities and Disciplines, Project 211, and Platforms of Advantageous Discipline Innovation of the Project 985 of China.
East China University of Science and Technology is a higher learning institution that first carried out safety engineering education. It established the first teaching and research office of safety engineering, Chemical Engineering Safety Technology Teaching and Research Office as early as in 1952. In 1953, it published the first professional textbook in the safety field, Petrochemical Engineering Fire Prevention and Explosion-proof Technology. In 1981, the university set the first batch of specialties of safety engineering for academic education, and it set the major of Safety Engineering in 2008. The Research Center of Reaction Safety of the East China University of Science and Technology is subordinate to the School of Resource and Environment, East China University of Science and Technology.
By introducing advanced reactive safety technology abroad, in close combination with the current safety status of China's chemical engineering industry, the Research Center of Reaction Safety of the East China University of Science and Technology aims to formulate a set of full-process reactive safety risk evaluation technology and risk control method for chemical engineering processes, which can meet China's situation, thus providing crucial technical support for safe production, dangerous chemical accident prevention, and emergency control and management in chemical engineering processes. The center will mainly center on chemical laboratory safety, dangerous chemical reaction safety, full-chemical-process reactive safety, battery thermal safety, and other fields to conduct relevant testing instrument development, analog simulation software development, safe database development, risk evaluation method research, etc.
(Updated in September 2025)
