Chemical Plant Design To Withstand External Blast Effects

The Project is designed to further understanding of the resistance of common plant items such as distillation columns, absorption towers, etc, to blast loadings generated by Unconfined Vapour Cloud Explosions. An extensive literature survey is presented covering current understanding of the phenomena including the likely modes of combustion, previous experimental work in the field and past industrial incidents. The main experimental programme was carried out at the ‘Explosion and Flame Laboratories' of the Health and Safety Executive in Buxton. This consisted of subjecting scale models of plant items to a simulation of an U.V.C.E. in an ‘Explosion ‘Gallery'. The resulting blast loading deformed the replicas both elastically and permanently. Theories developed for similar circumstances of dynamically applied loads (27,28) were used for this particular problem, and the results are presented in this report. The explosion gallery work was quantified by way of a ‘Flow Visualization Technique' called the ‘Hydraulic Jump Analogy '. This is a representation of a shock wave in a gaseous medium by a ‘shooting wave ' flowing across a water surface. The thesis concludes that a satisfactory simulation of an industrial vapour cloud explosion was achieved, but the suggested theories (27,28) do not adequately describe the deformation of the replicas in the main experimental programme.