Industrial Explosion Protection Guidelines

The purpose of this publication is to demonstrate to engineers, plant managers, safety officers, and others, the risks associated with using flammable dusts. Examples of dust explosion incidents that have occurred in practice are used to help people without specialized knowledge in the field of dust explosions to assess whether or not explosion hazards due to dust may exist in their own plant.

The examples have been chosen so that, where possible, all important aspects of dust explosions are illustrated. These include:
• Different types of dust (e. g. plastic, food, sawdust)
• Hybrid mixtures
• The effect of particle size
• Ignition sources (e. g. flames, mechanical sparks, static electricity)
• Different types of plants (e. g. mixers, silos, dryers)
• Different safety measures (e. g. limitation of the amount of flammable material, avoidance of ignition sources, explosion suppression)

The different dust explosion safety measures include:
• Explosion prevention (preventing the formation of an explosive dust/air mixture and avoidance of effective ignition sources)
• Explosion protection (measures to prevent the hazardous consequences of an explosion)
• Additional organizational measures

The dust explosion examples described in this publication are based on actual incidents that have occurred in Europe during the last 25 years. Certain aspects have been simplified either to better show the cause and course of the event or to clearly demonstrate a particular safety measure. In the majority of the examples only one possible safety measures that could have been used to prevent a reoccurrence of the incident is described.

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