Advances in Explosion Protection: How Advanced Solutions Open New Doors

Related Vendors

DÜPERTHAL Sicherheitstechnik GmbH & Co. KG

Italvacuum, Srl

TRM Filter d.o.o.

Fike Europe B.v.b.A.

Fike Corporation

Deflagration Science – Benefits for Explosion Protection Technology

Many of the advances in this area have been international and can be found in literature, symposium proceedings and journals. A particularly active area has been in the use of sophisticated computational techniques for modelling and predicting behaviour.

The seminal product is probably the computational fluid dynamics based program termed FLACS (Gexcon). This has been successfully applied to gas explosions and more recently the methodology has been extended to work with dust explosions (DESC). While still in development, it has promise of becoming a useful tool for modelling deflagrations as well as protection efficacy. Potential benefits include more efficient large scale tests, non-standard protection designs and post-explosion diagnostics. Other computational programs such as EFFEX (Ineris) are actively being developed.

Understanding Explosions is Key to Efficient and Safe Technology

Another area of wide interest is a better understanding of turbulence, turbulent burning velocities and laboratory measurements of explosibility parameters. As a beginning, NFPA 68 has recognized that very high turbulence will affect K_st and change vent area requirements.

Similar interest exists in the effect of low turbulence conditions. Eckhoff [1] reminded of the significant effect of ignition location and turbulence on deflagration development within large vented silos and noted that suppression would benefit from a more basic design involving advanced numerical simulation codes.

Explosion protection always accompanies explosion protection – more on page 3!

(ID:35073310)