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Vincent Van Brunt’s students might think at times that they’ve blundered into an art appreciation class. What they have encountered is a chemical engineering professor who understands the power of art.
Van Brunt points to a picture of the French surrealist René Magritte’s painting of a tobacco pipe and asks his students, “What is this?”
Their usual response: It’s a pipe.
Beneath the image, Magritte painted these words: “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” Van Brunt translates the line for his non-Francophone students: “This is not a pipe.”
“The point is that this is a picture of a pipe—not an actual pipe. From an engineering standpoint, we have to remember that a model of something is not the same as the real thing,” he said. “No matter how much a model is tested, it’s still just a model. It’s possible to draw false conclusions from that.”
In Van Brunt’s course on chemical process safety, the right picture can paint a thousand words of lecture and get students thinking about engineering principles in new ways. He began teaching the course more than 12 years ago in response to several deadly chemical plant disasters around the world.
“Art is the strongest metaphor I can use to rapidly illustrate important principles in chemical process safety,” said Van Brunt, who grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., and spent untold hours hanging out in art museums. “I always thought of art in a personal way, but it struck me a few years ago that some of these images could make very useful analogies.”
Consider another Magritte image, entitled “Discovery of Fire,” that depicts a tuba engulfed in flames. Van Brunt uses the burning tuba to get his students into a discussion on oxidation and fire. They learn that a tuba can burn, though not with the kind of flames in Magritte’s surreal picture.
A Magritte picture called “Clairvoyance” depicts an artist looking at an egg and painting a bird.
“One might infer that the artist portrayed in the painting knew exactly what the egg would eventually become,” Van Brunt said. “Engineers sometimes make the mistake of extrapolating too much information from a little bit of evidence—seeing beyond what the data presents. When investigating an explosion, there is a great temptation to leap to a conclusion as to the root cause.”
“Magritte named the picture that to suggest the artist somehow knew what the egg would eventually become,” Van Brunt said. “Engineers sometimes make the mistake of extrapolating too much information from a little bit of evidence—seeing beyond what the data presents.”
Using art to emphasize his teaching points is more than a clever teaching tool, Van Brunt said. He hopes the images and the corresponding lessons will stay in his students’ minds long after they graduate.
“In some small chemical plants, a USC graduate might be the only professionally trained engineer on staff,” Van Brunt said. “If they don’t have some knowledge of process safety issues when they leave here, I have, in essence, turned out a defective product.”
Van Brunt flips to one of his favorite images—Egbert van der Poel’s painting, “View of Delft after the Explosion of 1654.” The scene captures the horrific devastation that followed the underground explosion of a 90,000-pound gunpowder magazine in the 17th-century Dutch town. It’s a graphic depiction of the engineering principle of overpressure, and a reminder of the consequences of sloppy safety.
03/03
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