HARSNET, Thematic Network on Hazard Assessment of Highly Reactive Systems

The Health and Safety Executive indicates that in United Kingdom, about five accidents per month involve exothermic runaway reactions, of which approximately half occur in batch or semibatch reactors. The major source of hazard comes from the highly reactive chemicals necessarily involved in many discontinuous processes and the strongly exothermic nature of many industrially important syntheses. In the event of loss of control, thermal runaway can result. Inappropriate engineering design for heat transfer, inadequate understanding of the process chemistry and thermodynamic, unsuitable control systems and inappropriate operational procedures, including training, have been highlighted as the prime causes of these types of incidents. Due to the importance of the field under consideration, most of the large companies and some universities and research centres have developed their own specific procedures for the safety assessment of highly reactive systems based on sophisticated instruments that can reproduce industrial processes at bench scale. However many fine and speciality chemicals are produced in Small and Medium Enterprises, SME, which usually do not have the necessary expertise to apply such methodologies. In addition, SME's frequently have limited resources so that there are severe constraints regarding the purchase or use of the type of expensive equipment sometimes needed for the testing methodologies. However, prevention of runaways and their consequences is of the highest priority for the chemical industry. Because of this, an important number of chemical companies, both, small and large, universities, and research centres have created HarsNet, supported by the European Commission. The acronym HarsNet means thematic network on hazard assessment of highly reactive systems. HarsNet is a thematic network included in the Industrial and Materials Technologies Programme (Brite EuRam, Project number: BET2-0572) of the European Commission. This type of thematic network is a platform to exchange and create knowledge, that joins specialists in a specific field, from European Universities and industry. The importance of HarsNet is guaranteed by the number of partners, 26 from 11 countries in the European Union as well as by the chemical industry participation, about the 58 % and by the economic support from the European Union.