Aerosols generated by accidents: pressurized liquid release experiments.

Safety assessments and environmental impact statements for facilities require an estimation of airborne releases from accidents. Aerosols generated by accidents are being investigated to develop the source terms for these releases. One example of a severe accidental release event is a pressurized liquid release. Pressurized liquid release experiments performed in static air measured the mass airborne as a function of source size and containment pressure. Pressurized releases with the containment breach above the liquid level were investigated. For this configuration, only containment pressure at the time of release was found to be a significant parameter. Releases in static air can be estimated using the relationships developed in this work. Weight percent of the airborne source ranged from 4 X 10(-4) to 0.15%. All of the pressurized releases produced a significant fraction of respirable particles.