Runaway in Chemical Batch Reactors

Of the two mechanisms discussed above, thermal runaway is by far the most common cause of safety problems in chemical batch reactors, given the ability of the system to largely exceed the desired reactor temperature and, hence, the normal operative pressure with high risk of explosion. It has been estimated that an important fraction of the chemical reactions executed daily in the chemical industry has heat effects large enough to eventually cause reactor thermal runaway [16] and that ineffective temperature control has been the cause of many incidents involving batch reactors [4, 6], 

when dealing with exothermic reactions, it is of utmost importance to determine in which conditions the batch reactor operation can be considered intrinsically safe. This is the subject of the present chapter, where guidelines are given for 

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