The ignition probability of gaseous mixtures of acetylene, hydrogen and ethylene with air due to mechanical impacts between stainless steel components was examined for various impact energies. Additionally, the sources of ignitions were identified by infrared high-speed recordings. The stainless steel types used had different chemical compositions in order to investigate the influence of the chromium content on the ignition probability. The investigations reveal different ignition probabilities of the gas mixtures as well as different sources of ignitions depending on the steel type used and the impact energy applied. Impact energies below 126 J resulted in ignition of the gaseous mixture at the hot surfaces of the pin or the plate in most of the cases. At higher energies, initiation of ignition due to abraded particles was more probable when using stainless steel components with lower chromium content whereas the source of ignition was almost exclusively limited to the hot surfaces of pin and plate for the steel with the highest chromium content. However, as opposed to the source of ignition, the probability of ignition could not be correlated to the chromium content of the stainless steel.
In the present study, ductile cast iron from an original DCI container with a wide variety of microstructure was
investigated in order to determine the materials fracture toughness under impact loading conditions. Three-point bending
specimens with thickness of 140 mm from a cubic DCI container were investigated at elevated loading rates to
provide reliable fracture toughness parameters for the assessment procedures. In contrast to static fracture behaviour,
the fracture toughness values of thick-walled DCI at higher loading rates show a remarkable reduction with decreasing
temperature up to 50 °C and a significant shift of the transition range. The lower bound fracture toughness value used
in the BAM DCI safety concept was confirmed for impact loading conditions by these fracture mechanics tests using
large specimens. These measurements are relevant to the licensing tests for storage containers without shock absorbers,
especially to the assessment of the dynamic behaviour of crack-like defects inside a cask structure under drop test conditions.
Using extensive dynamic numerical analyses it could be shown, that for special crack configurations the dynamic
crack tip parameter (KI, or J) may be estimated by static formulae even under mechanical impact. These results
of the safety assessment were verified according to the German Konrad repository acceptance criteria by a drop test
with a cubic waste container with artificial crack-like defects from 5 m height onto a representative storage facility
foundation.