Purdue's P2SAC Brings Together 32 Companies for Landmark Process Safety Conference
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — The Purdue Process Safety and Assurance Center held its 24th Spring Conference May 5–7, drawing 90 attendees and leaders from 34 companies across the chemical, pharmaceutical, oil and gas, and manufacturing industries to Purdue's West Lafayette campus for three days of research, collaboration and dialogue on the front lines of process safety.
The conference consisted of programming spanned tutorials, technical sessions and open discussions organized across three distinct tracks: general process safety and assurance, artificial intelligence applications in process safety, and pharmaceutical process safety.
"What makes this community truly exceptional is the collaboration in the room," said Osman Basaran, Burton and Kathryn Gedge Professor of Chemical Engineering and P2SAC's founding academic director. "When industry and academia come together like this, it advances the science and ultimately saves lives."
Three Days of Applied Process Safety
The conference opened on May 5 with a full day of tutorials led by experts from both academia and industry. Sessions covered AI applications in the chemical industry, the safe handling of autocatalytic exothermic materials, cultural assessment in chemical and nuclear sectors, and computational fluid dynamics of explosions and detonations.
Day 2 shifted to a full-day technical conference on safety and assurance, featuring presentations from organizations including Columbia University, ExxonMobil, Air Products, Kiewit Energy Solutions, AcuTech, PSRG, and Fauske & Associates. Topics ranged from converting piping and instrumentation diagrams into AI-ready formats to battery safety, pipeline leak detection and risk management program updates.
The third day focused on pharmaceutical process safety, with presentations from Dow, Evonik, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Merck, Johnson Matthey and others. Sessions addressed calorimetry, process safety team development in pharmaceutical settings, technology transfer challenges and AI-assisted incident investigation.
Ray Mentzer, P2SAC executive director and professor of engineering practice, opened each day with an overview of the center's research activities. "We’re particularly excited that during the past seven years we have had ~25 research projects annually, nearly all identified and mentored by our sponsor companies," Mentzer said. "The sharing of learnings across companies is something our sponsors tell us they value enormously."
Research That Connects Classroom to Industry
The conference highlighted a broad portfolio of active P2SAC research projects, including doctoral work on machine learning-aided safety hazard detection, real-time lithium-ion battery thermal runaway detection and new computational tools for predicting chemical reactivity.
At the master's level, industry-mentored projects are underway in areas including AI-driven hazard assessments, reactive hazard assessments for dusts, optimal design of process safety management systems and guidelines for storing unstable materials. Five projects just concluded for the spring semester, with six planned for the summer with various industry mentors.
An undergraduate researcher also presented an estimation of decomposition energies for organometallic compounds — a project conducted in partnership with sponsor Johnson Matthey.
A Growing Community Built on Partnership
P2SAC was founded on the premise that meaningful process safety expertise requires sustained collaboration between universities and the industries most affected by process incidents. The center's corporate sponsor model — typically structured as a three-year, $25,000 per year partnership — supports both direct research engagement and access to Purdue's pipeline of chemical engineering talent.
Sponsors at the Spring 2026 conference included Eli Lilly, Amgen, Vertex, Kenexis, GSK, Fauske & Associates, Pfizer, AcuTech, Corteva Agriscience, ExxonMobil, Johnson Matthey, the Process Safety and Reliability Group, Evonik, Thermal Hazard Technology and Takeda. Kenexis sponsored the Wednesday luncheon.
In exchange for their investment, sponsors receive direct engagement in research project selection, access to biannual meetings to review research progress, opportunities to recruit students developing process safety expertise, and the ability to share process safety learnings and challenges with peer companies in a collaborative setting. Purdue is one of the few universities to teach a process safety course, required of all seniors.
"P2SAC is uniquely positioned because of its focus on the science underlying process safety — not just compliance or checklists," Basaran said. "We bring chemical engineering rigor to questions that have real consequences in the real world."
About P2SAC
The Purdue Process Safety and Assurance Center is based in the Davidson School of Chemical Engineering at Purdue University. The center conducts fundamental and applied research, teaches process safety courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels and serves as a hub of expertise for industry, government and academia. P2SAC holds biannual conferences each spring and fall. Companies interested in becoming P2SAC sponsors or learning more about the center's research portfolio are encouraged to contact Prof. Osman Basaran at obasaran@purdue.edu or Prof. Ray Mentzer at rmentzer@purdue.edu, or visit engineering.purdue.edu/P2SAC.