Industrial Dust Explosions. A Brief Review

This paper first addresses the question: what is a dust explosion? Afterwards, some specific issues are briefly reviewed: materials that can give dust explosions, factors influencing ignitability and explosibility of dust clouds, the combustion of dust clouds in air, ignition sources that can initiate dust explosions, primary and secondary dust explosions, dust flash fires, explosions of “hybrid mixtures”, and detonation of dust clouds. Subsequently, measures for dust explosion prevention and mitigation are reviewed. The next section presents the case history of an industrial dust explosion catastrophe in China in 2014. In the final section, a brief review is given of some current research issues that are related to the prevention and mitigation of dust explosions. There is a constant need for further research and development in all the areas elucidated in the paper.