Hydroxylamine nitrate (HAN), an important agent for the nuclear industry
and the U.S. Army, has been involved in several costly incidents. To prevent similar
incidents, the study of HAN safe storage and handling boundary has become
extremely important for industries. However, HAN decomposition involves
complicated reaction pathways due to its autocatalytic behavior and therefore
presents a challenge for definition of safe boundaries of HAN storage and handling.
This research focused on HAN decomposition behavior under various conditions and
proposed isothermal aging testing and kinetic-based simulation to determine safety
boundaries for HAN storage and handling.
Specifically, HAN decomposition in the presence of glass, titanium, stainless
steel with titanium, or stainless steel was examined in an Automatic Pressure
Tracking Adiabatic Calorimeter (APTAC). n-th order kinetics was used for initial
reaction rate estimation. Because stainless steel is a commonly used material for
HAN containers, isothermal aging tests were conducted in a stainless steel cell to determine the maximum safe storage time of HAN. Moreover, by changing thermal
inertia, data for HAN decomposition in the stainless steel cell were examined and the
experimental results were simulated by the Thermal Safety Software package.
This work offers useful guidance for industries that manufacture, handle, and
store HAN. The experimental data acquired not only can help with aspects of process
safety design, including emergency relief systems, process control, and process
equipment selection, but also is a useful reference for the associated theoretical study
of autocatalytic decomposition behavior.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/5935 |
| Date | 17 September 2007 |
| Creators | Zhang, Chuanji |
| 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 Thesis, text |
| Format | 1018319 bytes, electronic, application/pdf, born digital |
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