Ignition of Combustible Dust Clouds by Strong Capacitive Electric Sparks of Short Discharge Times

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Abstract It has been known for more than half a century that the discharge times of capacitive electric sparks can influence the minimum ignition energies of dust clouds substantially. Experiments by various workers have shown that net electric-spark energies for igniting explosive dust clouds in air were reduced by a factor of the order of 100 when spark discharge times were increased from a few μs to 0.1–1 ms. Experiments have also shown that the disturbance of the dust cloud by the shock/blast wave emitted by “short” spark discharges is a likely reason for this. The disturbance increases with increasing spark energy. In this paper a hitherto unpublished comprehensive study of this problem is presented. The work was performed about 50 years ago, using sparks of comparatively high energies (strong sparks). Lycopodium was used as test dust. The experiments were conducted in a brass vessel of 1 L volume. A transient dust cloud was generated in the vessel by a blast of compressed air. Synchronization of appearance of dust cloud and spark discharge was obtained by breaking the spark gap down by the dust cloud itself. This may in fact also be one possible synchronization mechanism in accidental industrial dust explosions initiated by electrostatic sparks. The experimental results for various spark energies were expressed as the probability of ignition, based on 100 replicate experiments, as a function of the nominal dust concentration. All probabilities obtained were 0%<p<100%. A tentative mathematical model could be fitted to all the data, assuming that the life time of the spark channel as an effective ignition source increased with the spark energy, that the minimum time of contact between the spark and the dust cloud for ignition to occur was a function of spark energy and nominal dust concentration, and that the stochastic element was the statistical distribution of the time interval between spark appearance and re-establishment of contact between spark channel and dust cloud, following detachment of the dust cloud from the spark by the shock/blast wave emitted by the spark discharge.