Unusual and unexpected explosive decomposition of PTFE thickened silicone oil based greases in high pressure grease pumps

摘要

To protect human health is one of the most important responsibilities of everyone. Being aware of this duty, we want to inform about an unusual and unexpected behaviour of PTFE thickened, silicone oil based greases, incurring explosions during the application with high pressure pumps.Several years ago an explosion took place in a customer facility during a grease filling procedure. The highly viscous silicone oil based grease was pumped with a standard high pressure grease pump. No high temperatures or other unusual operating conditions werepresent during the filling process. One of the workers was injured by this explosion. Because we could not find a reasonable cause for this explosion and because quality issues of the grease could be ruled out, we started a deeper examination of this phenomenon with the aim to avoid this in future. Despite the fact that the detailed mechanism of the observed explosions still isn’t finally understood, possible explanations are given in this presentation and ways to avoid explosive decompositions of this type are discussed.