Fire and Explosion Safety of Alternative Fuel Vehicles

This chapter gives a summary of various types of alternative fuel vehicles and some incidents reported in the literature. It also summarizes different fire scenarios, including jet fires, spilled fires, battery vehicle fires and fireballs. Many of these issues have also been discussed in previous chapters. The focus is on the explosion safety hazards of alternative fuel vehicles. These explosion hazards are tank rupture, BLEVE and gas cloud explosion. The methods of calculating blast wave pressures in an open environment are described. The difference between a tunnel explosion and an open explosion is discussed. Existing knowledge of explosion hazards in tunnels is summarised. Examples of individual explosion hazards are given.