Accidental Continuous Releases from Coal Processing in Semi-Confined Environment

Notwithstanding the enforcement of ATEX EU Directives (94/9/EC of 23 March 1994) and safety management system application, explosions in the coal sector still claim lives and cause huge economic losses. Even a consolidated activity like coke dry distillation allows the opportunity of preventing explosion risk connected to fugitive emissions of coke oven gas. Considering accidental releases under semi-confined conditions, a simplified mathematical approach to the maximum allowed gaseous build-up is developed on the basis of the intrinsic hazards of the released compound. The results will help identifying and assessing low rate release consequences therefore to set-up appropriate prevention and control measures. The developed methodology was tested at the real-scale and validated by numerical computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations showing the effectiveness of the methodology to evaluate and mitigate the risk connected to confined hazardous releases. \ua9 2013 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland