Fauske & Associates (FAI) was the principal research contractor for the Design Institute for Emergency Relief Systems (DIERS), an extensive R & D program sponsored by those 29 companies under the auspices of AIChE and completed in 1985. Company founder, Dr. Hans K. Fauske served as the principal investigator and overall technical leader of the DIERS research project. A primary purpose of that effort was the evaluation of emergency relief vent requirements, including energy and gas release rates for systems under upset conditions and the effect of two-phase flow on the emergency discharge process.
The DIERS program resulted in the development at FAI of the first bench-scale low thermal-inertia adiabatic calorimeter, which was first commercialized as the Vent Sizing Package (VSP™). Later improvements led to the VSP2™. The Reactive System Screening Tool (RSST™) was introduced by FAI in 1989 to provide an easy, inexpensive approach to the DIERS testing method. Subsequent enhancements led to the Advanced RSST (ARSST™) in 1999.
FAI uses the DIERS-based VSP2™ and ARSST™ calorimeters to characterize reactive chemical systems and design emergency pressure relief systems. Both instruments provide vent sizing data that are directly applicable to the process scale (directly scalable) which is generally a much easier and more reliable approach than mathematical correction for thermal inertia and kinetic modeling of runaway chemistry.
The purposes of DIERS is to:
- Reduce the frequency, severity, and consequences of pressure producing accidents
- Develop new techniques which will improve the design of emergency relief systems
