About the Authors

Daniel A. Crowl retired from Michigan Technological University in 2015 and he and his wife moved to Salt Lake City, UT. He has taught the required process safety course in Chemical Engineering at the University of Utah as an Adjunct Professor since 2016. He continues to assist with AICHE sponsored faculty workshops hosted by the chemical industry.

Professor Crowl is the Past Herbert H. Dow Professor for Chemical Process Safety and an Emeritus Professor at Michigan Technological University. His research at Michigan Tech included improving the characterization methods for flammable gases and liquids. This work was coupled with BASF’s Corporate Engineering and Louvar’s safety program to ensure that the work was industrially relevant. This research improved the world-wide standards on flammability.

Professor Crowl received his B.S. in fuel science from Pennsylvania State University and his M.S. and Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Illinois.

He began his teaching career at Wayne State University in Detroit in 1977. In 1985 he spent the summer working at BASF in Wyandotte, MI where he first learned about chemical process safety.

Professor Crowl is CCPS Certified (CCPSC) in process safety.

Professor Crowl is author/editor of several AICHE books on process safety and editor of the safety section in the seventh and eighth editions of Perry’s Chemical Engineer’s Handbook.

Professor Crowl has won numerous awards, including the Merit Award from the Mary K. O’Conner Process Safety Center at Texas A&M University, the Chemical Health and Safety Award from ACS, the Bill Doyle and Walton/Miller awards from the Safety and Health Division of AICHE, the Catalyst Award from the American Chemistry Council and the Gary Leach Award from the AICHE Board.

He is a Fellow of AICHE, ACS Safety and Health Division, and CCPS.

Joseph F. Louvar has a B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in chemical engineering. He recently retired as a professor at Wayne State University where he taught for ten years after retiring from BASF Corporation. As a professor at Wayne State University, he taught chemical process safety, risk assessment, and process design. At BASF Corporation, he was a director of BASF’s Chemical Engineering Department. His responsibilities at BASF included the production of specialty chemicals, and he managed the implementation and maintenance of five processes that handled highly hazardous chemicals covered by Process Safety Management. One of his department’s responsibilities included characterizing the hazardous properties of chemicals for BASF’s plants and engineering organizations. This responsibility included the management of facilities, specialized equipment, and personnel experts. His safety experts were tied into Crowl’s MTU research to improve the fundamental basis. This included flammability, explosivity, and reactivity characteristics of liquids, vapors, and dusts.

Joseph F. Louvar is the author of many safety-related publications and the coauthor of two books, Chemical Process Safety: Fundamentals with Applications and Health and Environmental Risk Analysis: Fundamentals with Applications. Professor Louvar was chair of the Loss Prevention Committee of the Safety and Health Division of AICHE. He was also the CCPS staff consultant for the Undergraduate Education Committee, currently known as the Safety and Chemical Engineering Education Committee (SACHE). He was the coeditor of AICHE’s journal for process safety, Process Safety Progress.