Use of (dP/dt)max from closed-bomb tests for predicting violence of accidental dust explosions in industrial plants

The rate of combustion of a given dust cloud depends not only on the chemical composition and particle size distribution of the dust, but also to a marked extent on the dust concentration, the extent to which particle agglomerates are broken up, and not least on the cloud turbulence. The three latter factors are entirely dependent on the way in which the dust cloud is generated in the actual industrial plant, and therefore the combustion rate per unit volume of cloud may in practice vary considerably for a given dust, depending on the industrial situation.Existing test methods for assessing the combustion rate to be expected from a given dust do not account for this. On the contrary, they all seem to work with largely arbitrary cloud generation processes. The present paper proposes some possible lines of development that may be followed to make the test methods more realistic.