Effect of stirring on the safety of flammable liquid mixtures

Flash point is the most important variable employed to characterize fire and explosion hazard of liquids. The models developed for predicting the flash point of partially miscible mixtures in the literature to date are all based on the assumption of liquid-liquid equilibrium. In real-world environments, however, the liquid-liquid equilibrium assumption does not always hold, such as the collection or accumulation of waste solvents without stirring, where complete stirring for a period of time is usually used to ensure the liquid phases being in equilibrium. This study investigated the effect of stirring on the flash-point behavior of binary partially miscible mixtures. Two series of partially miscible binary mixtures were employed to elucidate the effect of stirring. The first series was aqueous-organic mixtures, including water+1-butanol, water+2-butanol, water+isobutanol, water+1-pentanol, and water+octane; the second series was the mixtures of two flammable solvents, which included methanol+decane, methanol+2,2,4-trimethylpentane, and methanol+octane. Results reveal that for binary aqueous-organic solutions the flash-point values of unstirred mixtures were located between those of the completely stirred mixtures and those of the flammable component. Therefore, risk assessment could be done based on the flammable component flash-point value. However, for the assurance of safety, it is suggested to completely stir those mixtures before handling to reduce the risk.