Note on mine gas measurement by flammability limits

• Published in: Process safety progress Vol. 23; no. 3; pp. 172 - 174
• Main Author: Le Chatelier, M.H.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Hoboken Wiley Subscription Services, Inc., A Wiley Company 01.09.2004
• ISSN: 1066-8527; 1547-5913
• DOI: 10.1002/prs.10031

Mister Shaw's apparatus, described above by Mr. Bayard, will seem, to many engineers, too complicated for current use in mines. The principle on which it rests, however, merits holding on to; it can be used in a much simpler fashion to the same ends, and give an extremely practical process for the rapid and precise analysis of mine gas. This principle consists in the fact that flammability or combustibility limits for a gas, that is to say, the minimal proportion of a gas that must be combined with air to obtain a combustible mixture, is an amount rigorously defined, able to be measured with very great precision. Because Mr. Shaw's affirmation is in contradiction to current ideas about flammability limits, I believed I must take up the study of this question again. I was able to establish the absolute accuracy of the facts advanced on this subject, and I verified that the flammability limits could be determined with certainty and without difficulty up to 1/1000th of total volume. If, in the former experiments, irregularities surrounding the flammability limit had been observed, it seems to have indicated that the gas volume measurements had not been made with sufficient precision. This is, in effect, the only questionable point in these experiments.