Detonation of fuel coolant explosions

Abstract

IN certain circumstances the mixing of a hot liquid and a cooler, vaporisable one leads to an explosive rate of vapour production. Such explosions have occured in foundries when molten metals and water mix¹, and when liquid natural gas is spilt on to water²; they may also occur in liquid-cooled nuclear reactors under accident conditions. It seems likely^3,4 that in these events an initial disturbance causes motions which fragment some of the material and so allow rapid heat transfer; this produces explosive expansion and further fragmentation, and so the reaction propagates through the medium. We give here a simple one-dimensional model of a system in which the two liquids are initially coarsely mixed, and show that there is the possibility of an extremely violent thermal explosion, the structure of which is analogous to that of a detonating chemical explosion.