Open Access

Safety characteristics are widely used in the process industry to design facilities in a safe way. For powders, they are normally investigated under turbulent conditions inside a spherical test vessel, the so called 20L-sphere, to disperse the dust in air. This has been the target of many researchers to either investigate the turbulence that is present during the standardized test conditions, to compare it to quiescent conditions or to manipulate it for the comparison to other conditions. The approaches have been numerous and while the focus used to be on obtaining different experimental results it has shifted more and more to different kinds of simulations. This review gives an overview about different simulation approaches and how they can be compared. It is also an overview over the experimental findings and compares it to data obtained for three different dusts while changing the pre-ignition turbulence level in a very fine way.