On the Usefulness of Phenomenological Approach to Model Explosions in Complex Industrial Systems

Explosion protection is the object of various national and international documents, which are focused on the functions, the intended uses or the dimensioning rules for specific systems. However, despite a few application examples are described in the usual guidelines, they are limited to the description of a protection that can be added on a single piece of equipment while it is not the case in industrial processes. Furthermore, in an ATEX explosion there is a strong coupling between the explosion and its environment. Because of this the guidelines recommendations cannot be transposed on an industrial site without due consideration. In this paper, a way to consider the real explosion conditions is given allowing a choice and dimensioning of a set of safety systems. An example is shown based on the example of a model of a real installation. The functional properties of the safety system are extracted from the certification tests whereas the explosion characteristics are extracted both from the standard combustion properties of the dust and from the latest knowledge about flame propagation. A specific focus is made on two fundamental aspects: on the one hand, the critical importance to understand how the flame propagates in a given complex system. On the other hand, the behaviour of the protection systems that can be used with caution as they quite systematically influence the explosion driven flow