ИСТИНА

Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor Explosion is a phenomenon encountered when a vol-ume of high-pressure liquid escapes into low-pressure atmosphere and boils up rapidly. The vapor-liquid mixture acting as a piston generates pressure waves strong enough to be consid-ered a major hazard of accidents with pressurized vessels. This type of events is termed as “physical” (as opposed to conventional “chemical”) explosion. Such explosions are a subject of numerous studies in industrial safety and risk analysis areas; at the same time, rapid ex-pansion of vapor-liquid mixture is featured by propagation of pressure waves both in the am-bient atmosphere and in the boiling liquid, interesting from the gas dynamics point of view. While experimental works are mostly focused on finding proper estimates for the explosion efficiency allowing the high explosive (TNT) overpressure-distance curves to be applied for evaluation of explosion consequences, various theoretical approaches revealing the fea-tures of rapid boil-up of depressurized liquid have been proposed. In the current work, a thermodynamically equilibrium model applied to physical explosions recently is over-viewed, and its further extension to inhomogeneous (stratified) initial states is discussed.