Influence of scale of dust testing systems on explosibility parameters

This work explores dust explosibility at different scales based on physical and chemical properties of the given dust samples and the corresponding data from different scales of test apparatus. The first part of the analysis examines the influence of scale on explosion severity parameters (e.g., P_max and K_St) of different materials at varying conditions. Following that, the relative importance of selected features for P_max and K_St values at different scales has been determined using permutation feature importance. Finally, empirical relations for explosibility parameters at different scales based on selected physico-chemical properties of fuel-air mixtures and deflagration parameters have been developed. The proposed framework has been used to study the explosibility of different materials (e.g., carbon black, oat grain flour, zinc, aluminum, iron, lignite, lycopodium, nitrocellulose, and polyethylene dust samples) with varying sizes. The analyses can be useful in understanding dust explosibility at different scales and reducing reliance on multiple testing, which is cumbersome and cost-intensive (especially testing in the 1-m³ chamber).