Applications of dust explosion hazard and disaster prevention technology
Introduction
On June 27, 2015, a major flash-fire accident involving corn flour occurred (Color Play Asia). Multicolored corn flour was sprayed into the air during an event at Formosa Fun Coast in New Taipei City, Taiwan; the powder ignited, and the accidental flash fire resulted in 15 deaths and 484 injuries, increasing the public's awareness of fire accidents (Chen and Shu, 2015; Wang et al., 2017; Yang and Shih, 2016). In addition, according to investigations, the petrochemical plants (located in the central and southern regions of Taiwan) of two different companies had acrylonitrile–butadiene–styrene (ABS) dust fire and explosion accidents, respectively, on July 10, 2015, and March 21, 2017 (Wu et al., 2019). Most fire and explosion accidents involving flammable dust occur at petrochemical or processing plants in which flammable dust is used as raw material in production or the finished product is flammable dust (Chen et al., 2012; Jones, 2003). To help prevent losses in factories, this study summarized 26 combustible dust fire and explosion accidents that occurred in petrochemical or processing plants in Taiwan and mainland China from 2005 to 2017 (Table 1). The statistics show that flammable dust fire and explosion accidents in Taiwan's petrochemical and processing plants occur approximately once every two years. This was repetitive. Please review.
In an investigation of the causes of the aforementioned dust fire and explosion accidents, the safety data sheets (SDSs) of the chemical powders did not contain the six fire and explosion prevention parameters for chemical powders, namely powder particle size and moisture content, minimum ignition energy (MIE), the minimum ignition temperature of the dust layer (MITL), the minimum ignition temperature of the dust cloud (MITC), and the limiting oxygen concentration (LOC). Therefore, numerous fire and explosion accidents involving flammable dust during factory operation have occurred. Dust explosion accidents in petrochemical plants and the colored corn flour flash fire at Formosa Fun Coast were caused by insufficient process safety information (PSI) regarding dust, leading to underestimation of process risks and overestimation of existing safety and protection measures (Barton and Rogers, 1997; Knegtering and Pasman, 2009).
To explore the proportion of petrochemical plant fire and explosion accidents in which the severity of process risks was underestimated and existing safety and protection measures were overestimated due to insufficient PSI, this study collected the accident reports of 46 fires that occurred in petrochemical plants or general factories in Taiwan from 2012 to 2019. Quantitative analysis was performed on 88 items related to the accidents’ causes and process safety management (PSM) (Amyotte and Lupien, 2017; Swuste et al., 2016). The summarization results revealed that PSI was insufficient in 25 of the accidents. The most critical management item of PSM is thus PSI, as illustrated in Fig. 1.
This study cooperated with a Taiwanese petrochemical group that promotes fire and explosion prevention and is conducting a project for controlling workplaces in which flammable dust is present. In total, a project inventory of 102 such workplaces in 77 of the group's Taiwanese plants was performed. During the project's launch, this study focused on 19 dust operation sites in 11 petrochemical plants. A total of 17 samples of combustible dust (including that produced and that used in production) from the sites were used to conduct experiments and identify 82 missing fire and explosion prevention parameters. The unknown fire and characteristic explosion parameters of the flammable dusts were investigated after the experiment to analyze the level of the flammable dust fire and explosion hazard, complementing safety inspections at work sites. The parameters were used to review whether worksite safety and protection measures have been established correctly and thus identify any inadequacies related to plant safety and provide suggestions for improvement.
Section snippets
Experiment and methods
This study referred to the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA)-654 specifications, which include 13 characteristic dust explosion parameters for locations containing flammable dust. These parameters are divided into three categories (NFPA, 2020)—six preventive parameters, four fire and explosion prevention parameters, and three other application parameters—and provided to plants using flammable dust as critical reference data for the plants’ fire and explosion safety assessments (Table 2
Results and discussion
In this section, the obtained characteristic dust hazard parameters are interpreted and applied to the actual processes of petrochemical plants. Common potential dust hazards in petrochemical plants are then analyzed, and specific improvements are proposed to improve the safety of petrochemical plants. This study measured the complete characteristic dust hazard parameters for the 17 powder samples collected from petrochemical plants, and the results are presented in Table 6.
Conclusions
This study explored the characteristic preventive safety parameters of dust in Taiwanese petrochemical plants and designed a dust safety management framework that was then applied in several plant's processes; the following favorable results were obtained:
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If flammable dust is a self-reactive substance, the risk assessment should review the risk of flammable or toxic gas release during operation or storage, and preventive and control measures must be formulated. For example, ABS powder
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
This study was financially supported by Taiwan Formosa Plastics Enterprise Group and National Yunlin University of Science and Technology. Without their contributions, this research paper will not be achieved.
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