Suppression effects of powder suppressants on the explosions of oxyhydrogen gas

Suppression tests of oxyhydrogen gas explosions were performed in an explosion tube with five types of dry powder used as the suppressants. The experimental results showed that the powder with large dust cloud density and small radius has better suppression effect, which agrees well with previous correlative results. Moreover, our results also showed that particles with chemical activity and light material density, their suppression effect are more prominent than that of the inert particles with heavy density. To discover the detailed suppression process of dust powder, governing equations were developed based on the homogeneous reactive two-phase flow. The TVD scheme and the Lax-Wendroff-Rubin scheme were adopted to solve the reactive gas phase and particle phase, respectively. The time splitting technique was employed to handle the stiffness of the coupled equations. Our calculated results showed that the dust cloud has the suppression effect on the explosion of oxyhydrogen gas, and with the increase of dust cloud density or the decrease of particle diameter, its suppression effect become more evident, which is in good agreement with our experimental results, in addition, the numerical results showed that with the same particle diameter, the suppression performance is enhanced with the reduction in particle material density. (C) 2006 Published by Elsevier Ltd.