Suppressive effect of explosion in linked spherical vessels and pipelines impacted by structure of wire mesh

A series of experiments were conducted to study the suppressive effect of multi-layer mesh structure on methane-air mixture explosion in linked vessels. The linked vessels are composed of two spherical vessels, 0.022 m³ and 0.113 m³ in volume, and a pipeline, 2 meters in length. Explosion suppression effect was analyzed for different explosion suppression structures with different layer number and different mesh number. The most reasonable multi-layer mesh structures were obtained through theoretical analysis and data comparisons of the experimental results. The results show that the number of multi-layer mesh has greater impact on explosion intensity in the primary vessel than that in the secondary vessel. The combination of different layer number and mesh number has different explosion suppression effect on the linked vessels. The number of mesh has a slight effect on explosion pressure in both the vessels when the number of layers is few. Even multi-layer mesh structure increases the intensity of explosion in linked spherical vessels and pipelines instead of suppressing. When the number of layers is more, the explosion pressure in both the vessels is greatly impacted by the number of mesh. When the number of mesh is constant, the more the number of layers, the better the explosion suppression effect. Under the experimental conditions, 5 layers and 7 layers are critical number of layers for 40 mesh and 60 mesh explosion suppression structure respectively. Compared with 5 layers and 40 mesh structure, 7 layers and 60 mesh explosion suppression structure is better. Therefore, in actual explosion protection design, the best explosion suppression structure should be decided by taking into account of the comprehensive effect of layer number and mesh number.