In the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) report,
Improving Reactive Hazard Management, there are 37 out of 167 accidents, which
occurred in a storage tank or a storage area. This fact demonstrates that thermal runaway
problems in chemical storage processes have not been give enough attention.
Hydroxylamine Nitrate (HAN) is an important member of the hydroxylamine
compound family and its diluted aqueous solution is widely used in the nuclear industry
for equipment decontamination. It is also used as a solid or aqueous propellant. Due to
its instability and autocatalytic behavior, it has been involved in several incidents at the
Hanford and Savannah River Sites (SRS). Much research has been conducted on HAN
in different areas, such as combustion mechanism, decomposition mechanism, and
runaway behavior. However, the autocatalytic behavior of HAN at runaway stage has
not been fully addressed due to its highly exothermic and rapid decomposition behavior.
This work focuses on extracting its autocatalytic kinetics mechanism and
studying its critical behavior from adiabatic calorimetry measurements. The lumped
autocatalytic kinetics model, the associated model parameters and HAN critical condition are determined for the first time. The contamination effect of iron ions and
nitric acid on diluted hydroxylamine nitrate solution is also studied.
This work also identified the safe storage conditions for a small quantity HAN
diluted solution with thermal explosion theory. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)
was used to further study the influence of natural convection and system scale on the
critical behavior for a large quantity of chemical and thus proposed the practical storage
guidelines for industrial practice.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2009-08-2948 |
| Date | 2009 August 1900 |
| Creators | Liu, Lijun |
| Contributors | Mannan, M. Sam |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Dissertation, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
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