Explosives safety research in the Netherlands

The handling of explosives and ammunition introduces a safety risk for personnel and third parties. Accidents related to storage, transport and transhipment may result in severe injury and material damage. TNO has developed a number of tools to quantify the consequences and risks of accidental explosions. Risk is defined as the multiplication of the probability of an event and its consequences. The tools differ in their application, considering explosion safety on a military base (within the home country or on a mission), or external safety (related to third parties outside a military base). Some tools are aimed at consequences, others also give risk quantities as output. Risk-NL is our national software for the risk analysis of ammunition storage sites. The individual risk and group risk calculated with Risk-NL have to be compared to Dutch risk criteria. Specifically for transhipment in ports the TNO Transhipment Tool can be employed. In this tool the probability of an accidental explosion depends on the exact type and frequency of the transhipment. The AASTP-5 Consequence Analysis Tool was developed for military bases abroad, taking into account the protection offered by specific armoured containers against various threats. This tool has been integrated in the latest version of the NATO Field Storage Manual AASTP-5, and is available for member nations. In the research program ‘Survivability of Compounds’, funded by the Dutch MoD this tool was further developed to predict not only physical consequences, but also consequence for the mission goals (i.e. at the system level). The Klotz Group Engineering Tool has been developed together with international partners in the Klotz Group, a group of explosives safety experts from 8 nations. This tool predicts the hazard from accidental explosions in reinforced concrete ammunition storage sites in detail. By comparing various scenarios the tools described above can also be used in cost-benefit analysis. The tools presented in this paper enable the analysis of a wide range of explosion safety problems.