Plastics

The Plastics industry is the third largest manufacturing operation in the U.S. alone with more than 16,000 plastics facilities. Potential dust explosion hazards exist during the production of resins from basic raw materials; the formulating of molding compounds, and the processing and fabricating of these materials into finished products.

Selecting the Right Explosion Protection System

There are three basic types of explosion protection systems: venting, isolation and suppression. Follow the flow chart to get a basic idea of which solution is right for your application.

THE INSIDE PROCESS EQUIPMENT SUSTAINED MAJOR DAMAGE

The Problem
A manufacturing of engineered building products used a composition of wood and ABS plastics in an extrusion, batch-type process to create their products.

The process had a deflagration which blew off the top of the blender unit and propagated the flame to an outside dust collector downstream. The inside process equipment sustained major damage, but no workers were injured.

Solution
Since the blender was inside the plant, potential explosions could not be vented to the outside. The blender was fitted with an explosion suppression system. A chemical isolation system was added to the dust extraction duct. The outside dust collector was already equipped with explosion vents but a chemical isolation system was added to the inlet duct.


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