Chemical reactivity hazards have posed a significant challenge for industries that
manufacture, store, and handle reactive chemicals. Without proper management and
control of reactivity, numerous incidents have caused tremendous loss of property and
human lives. The U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) reported
167 incidents involving reactive chemicals that occurred in the U.S. from 1980 to 2001.
According to the report, 35 percent of the incidents were caused by thermal runaway
reactions, such as incidents that involved hydroxylamine and hydroxylamine nitrate.
The thermal stability of hydroxylamine system under various industrial
conditions was studied thoroughly to develop an understanding necessary to prevent
recurrence of incidents. The macroscopic runaway reaction behavior of hydroxylamine
system was analyzed using a RSST (Reactive System Screening Tool) and an APTAC
(Automatic Pressure Tracking Calorimeter). Also, computational chemistry was
employed as a powerful tool to evaluate and predict the measured reactivity. A method
was proposed to develop a runaway reaction mechanism that provides atomic level ofinformation on elementary reaction steps, in terms of reaction thermochemistry,
activation barriers, and reaction rates.
This work aims to bridge molecular and macroscopic scales for process safety
regarding reactive chemicals and to understand macroscopic runaway reaction behaviors
from a molecular point of view.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/4154 |
| Date | 30 October 2006 |
| Creators | Wei, Chunyang |
| Contributors | Mannan, M. Sam |
| Publisher | Texas A&M University |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Dissertation, text |
| Format | 1946091 bytes, electronic, application/pdf, born digital |
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