Consideration of Heat Accumulation Risks in Practice

摘要

Self-heating due to slow thermal degradation during long term storage or transportation of bulk materials represents a hazard, which is often underestimated. Over longer periods of time, even very small reaction rates may thermally self-accelerate to a runaway situation whenever large quantities of material are involved. Secondary events of high severity may be induced by a resulting thermal explosion, which may lead into a detonation and/or spreading of toxic or flammable chemicals. The concepts of time to maximum rate and the characteristic time of cooling will be discussed for the cases where the temperature is homogeneous and not homogeneous. The experimental methods to characterize decomposition reactions will be presented. The transport tests for dangerous self-heating substances will also be given.