Explosion prevention and weighting analysis on the inerting effect of methane via grey entropy model

Abstract Explosion prevention is vital for process safety and daily life. In practice, inerting is viewed as an ideal method to reach basic explosion prevention as well as to diminish flammability risk in normal operation, storage, and transportation of materials. This study deals with the inerting effect on the explosion range for methane via grey entropy model, comparatively detected under the different inert gases of nitrogen (N2), argon (Ar), and carbon dioxide (CO2), which have various loading inerting concentrations: 10 (90 vol% air), 20 (80 vol% air) and 25 vol% (75 vol% air). The inert influences were determined via the experimental 20-L-apparatus investigations under 1 atm, 30 OC, combined with the grey entropy model, which is one of the most prevailingly used grey system theories for weighting analysis and decision-making of the fire and explosion assessment for practical operations. The results indicated that CO2 had better inerting capacity than the others, as derived from our grey entropy theoretical soft computing calculations. Through the combination of the grey entropy weighting analysis model and the flammability investigations in this study, the concluded decision-making was feasible and useful for the practical applications of inert gases for preventing fire and explosion hazards in relevant processes.