Blast Load Significance on Pressure Testing Enclosure Designs

Pressure vessels that operate at high pneumatic pressures (greater than 10,000 psi [69 MPa]) pose several potential hazards to nearby personnel, including projectile launch and blast loads that may occur as a result of a vessel failure. In order to provide personnel protection, pressure vessels are often placed inside test enclosures. However, sometimes these enclosures are built with the intent to create an exclusion zone but are not designed to contain these hazards. On some occasions, local shields are used to provide protection from potential projectiles that may be launched from a failed pressure vessel without regard to blast loads that will ensue from a pneumatically-charged vessel. The purpose of this experimental test is to demonstrate the importance of properly designing test enclosures to contain blast loads from a pneumatic pressure vessel failure. In this test, the walls and roof of the enclosure failed in response to blast loads emanating from a failed pneumatic pressure vessel test and were thrown as a secondary debris hazard. The vessel was designed to fail in a manner consistent with the most common failure modes as reported in industry. Blast loads inside the enclosure and the dynamic structural response were monitored during the experiment. Blast loads obtained from a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model and the structural response from a finite element analysis (FEA) model are also discussed.