Dust cloud evolution and flame propagation of organic dust deflagration under low wall influence

The present study discusses experiments on organic dust explosions in a setup with low wall influence. The proposed apparatus decouples the dust dispersion and the deflagration event in two separate compartments. The use of a continuous-wave laser to illuminate the centre plane of the observation chamber allows capturing both, the dust cloud and the flame during the same experiment and eliminates typical problems caused by the limited dynamic range of high-speed cameras. A k-means clustering method is used for image segmentation to obtain the spatial extent and the propagation velocities of the unreacted particle cloud and the flame zone. Spatially resolved velocities are calculated by the additional use of an optical flow method. The main goal of the presented setup and image processing method is to provide high quality validation data for the development of numerical models on dust deflagration.     

A numerical model for the prediction of the minimum ignition temperature of dust clouds

This paper presents a numerical model for the prediction of the minimum ignition temperature (MIT) of dust clouds. First, a physical model is developed for the dust cloud ignition in the Godbert-Greenwald furnace. A numerical approach is then applied for the MIT prediction based on the physical model. The model considers heat transfer between the air and dust particles, the dust particle reaction kinetics, and the residence times of dust clouds in the furnace. In general, for the 13 dusts studied, the calculated MIT data are in agreement with the experimental values. There is also great accordance between the experimental and numerical MIT variation trends against particle size. Two different ignition modes are discovered. The first one consists in ignition near the furnace wall for bigger particles characterized by rather short residence times. In the second mode, the ignition starts from the center of the furnace by self-heating of the dust cloud for smaller particles with longer residence times. For magnesium, as dust concentration increases, the lowest ignition temperature of the dust cloud IT(conc) decreases first, then transits to increase at a certain point. The transition happens at different dust concentrations for different particle sizes. Moreover, the MIT of the magnesium dust cloud generally increases as particle size increases, but the increasing trend stagnates within a certain medium particle size range.