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The term is considered by many safety professionals to be the same as the lower explosive level (LEL). At a concentration in air lower than the LFL, gas mixtures are "too lean" to burn. Methane gas has an LFL of 4.4%. [1] If the atmosphere has less than 4.4% methane, an explosion cannot occur even if a source of ignition is present.
A balloon filled with gaseous hydrogen exploding.. A gas explosion is the ignition of a mixture of air and flammable gas, typically from a gas leak. [1] In household accidents, the principal explosive gases are those used for heating or cooking purposes such as natural gas, methane, propane, butane.
The flammability limits of the gas define those proportions, i.e. the ignitable range. In combustion engineering terms, the admission of inert gas can be said to dilute the oxygen below the limiting oxygen concentration. Inerting differs from purging. Purging, by definition, ensures that an ignitable mixture never forms. Inerting makes an ...
The original mass of flammable material and the mass of the oxygen consumed (typically from the surrounding air) equals the mass of the flame products (ash, water, carbon dioxide, and other gases). Lavoisier used the experimental fact that some metals gained mass when they burned to support his ideas (because those chemical reactions capture ...
A molecule is said to have a positive oxygen balance if it contains more oxygen than is needed and a negative oxygen balance if it contains less oxygen than is needed. [2] An explosive with a negative oxygen balance will lead to incomplete combustion, which commonly produces carbon monoxide, which is a toxic gas. Explosives with negative or ...
The main mechanism of detonation propagation is of a powerful pressure wave that compresses the unburnt gas ahead of the wave to a temperature above the autoignition temperature. In technical terms, the reaction zone (chemical combustion) is a self-driven shock wave where the reaction zone and the shock are coincident, and the chemical reaction ...
The yield of the explosion was determined by using the equation: = () where is a dimensionless constant that is a function of the ratio of the specific heat of air at constant pressure to the specific heat of air at constant volume. The value of C is also affected by radiative losses, but for air, values of C of 1.00-1.10 generally give ...
Because most combustion processes that happen naturally occur in the open air, there is nothing that confines the gas to a particular volume like the cylinder in an engine. As a result, these substances will burn at a constant pressure, which allows the gas to expand during the process.