Process safety
Main content
Process safety (PS) focuses on explosion science, primarily accidental dust, gas, and hybrid explosions, but also mist explosions, vapour explosions, boiling liquid expanding vapour explosions (BLEVES), and blast waves from solid explosives (explosives, pyrotechnics, and propellants). Occasionally the research activities also target other aspects of process safety, such as loss of containment of hazardous materials and industrial fires (jet and pool fires).
The experimental activities related to PS focus on ignition phenomena, safety indices, and flame acceleration for fuel-air explosions, including minimum ignition energy (MIE), auto-ignition temperature (AIT), maximum experimental safety gap (MESG), maximum explosion pressure (Pmax), maximum rate of pressure rise (dP/dt)max, lower flammability limits (LFL), upper flammability limit (UFL), deflagration-to-detonation-transition (DDT), and chemical inhibition.
The modelling activities focus on gas and dust explosions. A long-term cooperation with Gexcon, involving several Master and PhD projects, has contributed to the development and validation of the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tool FLACS, and PS is also involved in the development of open-source CFD tools in cooperation with academic partners.
In recent years, the focus of PS has shifted towards hydrogen safety, including hybrid mixtures, in industry and society, and several of the ongoing projects focus on the Strength of Knowledge (SoK) in risk assessments for hydrogen systems.
PS cooperates with various partners from academia and the labour market.
