“If the relief valve had opened at a lower pressure, this second reaction would not have had the initiating conditions to bring it into a runaway,” said Willey. They offer three scenarios: Diglyme decomposition under normal conditions, when cooling is functioning properly, diglyme decomposition under the conditions present during the accident, when the relief valve was set to 400 pounds, and diglyme decomposition under an intermediate set of conditions, where the relief valve was set to 75 pounds. The graph to the left shows some of the results from the team’s efforts. Cutlip used the data from the CSB report to analyze the accident to mathematically model the chemical reaction involved in the accident. The reactor exploded with the force equivalent to 1400 lbs of TNT, according to the Chemical Safety Board, which completed a report on the incident in 2009. When the pressure reached 400 pounds, the relief valve opened releasing the pressure. As this process continued (a runaway reaction), gas built up in the reactor. Eventually, the temperature rose so high that the solvent in which the reaction was taking place began to decompose - another more violent exothermic reaction, which heated the system even more. The heating up caused the reaction to go faster. One day - Decemthe cooling water mechanism failed. The heat from the reaction would transfer into the water, which would boil and release the heat with its steam while more cool water enveloped the reactor. The reaction took place in a 2450 gallon reactor vessel surrounded by cooling water. The process involved a large scale exothermic reaction - meaning it created lots of heat. T2 was a small start-up company manufacturing a gasoline additive. Last year Willey’s article analyzing the chemical reaction that led to the tragic explosion at T2 Laboratories in 2007 earned him the Bill Doyle Award for best paper presented at the 2011 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Loss Prevention Symposium, the second highest award in the specialized area of process safety. “My interest is in getting safety into chemical engineering education and creating material to communicate about accidents so we can learn from them,” he said in an interview this afternoon. Chemical engineering professor Ron Willey may tell you he’s a stoic, but it’s clear he is passionate about at least one thing: the well being of his fellow chemical engineers.
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