Strategy for Managing Reactivity Hazards

The last few months have witnessed a high degree of focus on understanding and managing chemical reactivity to improve safety in process plants. These efforts have reinforced an important aspect of chemical reactivity, i.e. it is extremely complicated to try and list properties characterizing reactivity hazards. As an example, commercial explosives contain 2000 cal/g or more of energy; however, most of the chemicals involved in incidents in the process industries have energies between 500 and 1500 cal/g. There are therefore a variety of aspects, besides the energy content, that can pose reactivity hazards and recognizing such scenarios is an area of considerable research. The principle objective of this document is to assist readers in understanding, evaluating, and managing reactivity hazards for a particular situation by directing them to appropriate sources and utilizing a tiered evaluation protocol.