Assessing the Severity of Runaway Reactions

Highly reactive substances might undergo undesired exothermic (runaway) reactions during transport, storage, or their chemical process. Major accidents may be triggered by this loss of thermal control in the system. Therefore, process safety issues related to chemical reaction hazards need to be systematically recognized and classified. The existing methodologies for risk assessment of hazardous materials are typically based on standard experimental activities, essentially calorimetry, rather than appropriated analysis, which is time consuming and economically not feasible. This chapter describes the fundamental concepts of risk analysis related to chemical reaction hazards and introduces a methodology for dynamic risk assessment based on a minimum set of data.