United States Department of Transportation
i
Reducing Flammability for Bakken Crude Oil for Train Transport – Phase I
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2018-12-07
[PDF-1.77 MB]
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Edition:Final report (Aug 2017-Sep 2018)
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Abstract:Various crude oil train derailments in recent years have exposed critical shortcomings in existing rail infrastructure. These incidents lead to large oil spills, and the oil finds itself in the presence of various hot surfaces on the site (such as wheel wells). This is an especially dangerous situation in the case of Bakken crude, which is of a light variety and contains significant amounts of easy to evaporate, easy to ignite light ends, and usually the result is an intense fireball. Work in the second year is about continuing the work from the first year and producing results that would help accomplish the goals of a larger, five-year project to improve fire safety during transportation by adding long chain polymers to crude oil before shipping. Previous research done by Professor Albert Ratner et al under MATC-DOT sponsorship has concluded that polymeric additives improve fire safety in diesel fuel and its blends by suppressing splashing, delaying ignition, and promoting flame extinction. There is a strong indication that the same will be true for crude oil. For the second year, the experimental droplet combustion and post processing software has been refitted and upgraded, and used to analyze combustion characteristics of acetylene black nanopowder in diesel and biodiesel fuels. This work has resulted in a manuscript that has been submitted for publication. Crude oil samples from various US petroleum production sites (including Bakken) have been sources, and have been similarly analyzed for their combustion behavior. This work is expected to help identify combustion surrogates, which are necessary for their homogeneity, reproducibility, and better optical properties. Establishment of reliable surrogates will allow the research to proceed into coming years, where various additives in different concentrations will be added to such surrogates to make suspensions, in order to modify their properties in order to minimize splashing and propensity towards ignition. Stability of such suspensions will be tested using methods and techniques developed in year 1.
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