Many doing critical cleaning have used aerosol-dispensed cleaning agents to reach certain portions of valuable surfaces so that the cleaning agent could do its “magic” and be removed with soil by a worker using a fabric wiper. In last month’s column we covered the chronic health hazard to the respiratory system associated with doing that work. In this column we’ll cover the acute flammability hazard to staff of the same. While this may be old business for some, others may not be aware of either hazard because aerosol dispensed cleaners are common and have been used for so long.

WITH AEROSOLS, FORGET MEASURED FLASH POINT
Many believe that aerosols are safe below their flash points. Serious fires have occurred in the chemical process industries because of that belief.

In fact, aerosols of combustible liquids at temperatures well below their flash points can be ignited as can vapor—air mixtures of flammable liquids. Eichhorn¹ made this observation more than a half-century ago, and introduced a conceptual idealized diagram to describe this situation (Figure 1).