Investigation on the explosible properties of textile dusts

The textile industry has encountered in the past some episodes of dust explosion with fatalities, monetary losses and serious damages. In general, the textile industry deals with “nontraditional dusts”, which originate from fibrous materials handled by the companies belonging to textile department. In order to better understand the hazard related to textile-related dusts, the local federation of employers of a northern Italian district funded a research program with the aim to make an extensive survey of the characteristics of the dusts present as by-product in several local manufacturers. One hundred dust samples were collected from several different industrial sites. Some of these were part of the wool manufacturing chain, others operated in the field of natural or synthetic fibers. All the samples were analyzed to determine the particle size distribution. Wet-sieving and/or laser diffraction methods were used depending on the sample. 15 samples were submitted to the speditive explosibility test (SET) developed at Politecnico di Torino (Danzi et. Al. 2016), 14 of these resulted explosible. Some samples, including the one which was negative at the SET, were submitted to test in a 20l sphere. All resulted explosible. In the paper the details of the experimental program and all the results are described.