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Consequences Analysis of Dust Explosions to Determine the Damage to Humans and Buildings

Bakhtiari, Saeed | 2017

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  1. Type of Document: M.Sc. Thesis
  2. Language: Farsi
  3. Document No: 49568 (06)
  4. University: Sharif University of Technology
  5. Department: Chemical and Petroleum Engineering
  6. Advisor(s): Rashtchian, Davood
  7. Abstract:
  8. Dust explosions are a serious hazard in many process industries and storage facilities. More than 70% of dusts processed in industry are combustible. This implies that majority of industrial plants that have dust processing equipment are susceptible to dust explosions. Dust explosions pose the most serious and widespread of explosion hazards in the process industry alongside vapour cloud explosions (VCE) and boiling liquid expanding vapour explosions (BLEVE). Dust explosions almost always lead to serious financial losses in terms of damage to facilities and down time. They also often cause serious injuries to personnel, and fatalities. In this project we presented a systematic algorithm in order to make consequences analysis of dust explosions and we use this algorithm to investigate safety issues in a wheat silo of Tehran bakhtar flour factory. One of the applications of this algorithm is to find the efficiency of explosion of dusts (except explosive ones) which has been obtained for the first time for corn starch. The results show that if the silo vents are designed properly, the consequences of the explosion will be negligible. In order to simulate dust explosions in wheat silos, we used ANSYS FLUENT with Eulerian-Lagrangian approach, assuming that an equilibrium reaction exists between the oxidizer and fuel. For evaluating the proposed method, we simulated dust explosion standard test in a sphere with the volume of 20 liters and the results were compared with experimental data which have been approved. The simulation was runned for the mentioned wheat silo and pressure versus time diagram was obtained. The results correspond well with the vent design standards such as EN14491 and NFPA68
  9. Keywords:
  10. Simulation ; Consequence Analysis ; ANSYS Software ; Eulerian-Lagrangian Approach ; Dust Explosion ; Vent Design

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