Expansion-controlled evaporation: a safe approach to BLEVE blast

Escalation thresholds in the assessment of domino accidental events

“…More often, vessel failure results in a simple loss of containment without the formation of a blast wave due to liquid explosion [8]. This was recently confirmed by Van den Berg et al [39], who estimated that a blast wave is formed only if the catastrophic disintegration of the entire vessel takes place in a limited time frame. These authors also provided scaled nomographs to evaluate the positive phase duration and the peak overpressure produced by a BLEVE as a function of the mass-scaled distance for the blast wave.…”

“…A further class of explosion is the boiling liquid expanding vapour explosion (BLEVE) that may cause a pressure wave due to the rapid liquid evaporation at atmospheric pressure [39]. For each of these categories of explosion, the blast waves are characterized by different shape, time duration and peak pressure, depending on the geometrical scenario and on the total available energy.…”

The boiling liquid expanding vapour explosion (BLEVE): Mechanism, consequence assessment, management

“…A different postulation has been made by Van den Berg et al [65], on the basis of acoustic and gas dynamic blast modeling validated by them using the data of Giesbrecht et al [66] on exploding vessels of liquefied propylene. According to Van den Berg et al [65], a rupture in a vessel containing a pressure liquefied gas in free space develops a blast of significant strength only if the vessel disintegrates nearly instantaneously; if the rupture and the catastrophic vessel failure are delayed even for a short duration, the blast effects are minor.…”

Blast from explosive evaporation of carbon dioxide: experiment, modeling and physics

“…Both the specific heat of the liquid/solid (C l ) and the heat of evaporation/sublimation (L) are dependent on the temperature, which has been approximated through curve fitting by the following relations [20,27]:…”

“…From a calculated amount of evaporated mass, the involved amount of energy can then be calculated. The CCPS [19] and PGS 2 [20], for instance, recommend a TNT-equivalency based on the full quantity of work done by the vapor pressure-driven expansion over the entire temperature fall. van den Berg et al [21,22] and van den Berg [23] go a step further and explicitly compute the gas dynamics of an explosive evaporation process numerically, starting from the assumption that the expansion is vapor pressure-driven and there are no limitations to the evaporation rate.…”