Can combustible dust explosions actually be prevented? In this episode of the OnAire Podcast, Jordan and Taylor sit down with Dr. Kingsly Ambrose of Purdue University to talk about combustible dust explosions, grain facility safety, fugitive dust, and what manufacturers can do to reduce risk. Dr. Ambrose studies particle technology and dust explosions and compiles annual data on combustible dust incidents. His goal is one we can all get behind: reaching a year with zero explosions, zero injuries, and zero deaths. But getting there takes more than equipment.
🔥 *What is one of the most important ways to prevent a combustible dust explosion?* Start by keeping the facility clean. Dr. Ambrose explains that preventing deposited and suspended dust from building up is a critical first step. From there, facilities need employee and contractor training, warning systems, explosion protection, and a safety culture where unusual noises, smells, or other warning signs are never ignored.
Episode Transcript:
Hey, welcome back to the OnAire Podcast, the place where we talk about all the dust and dirt in your life, or your industrial life, that is. I’m Jordan.
And I’m Taylor.
Hey, thanks for joining us for another episode. We’ve got a good one today.
Oh yeah. We get to talk to somebody that we look for an article every year. We’re getting to talk to a professor. We’re getting smart. Neither of us wore glasses today, but we feel smarter after talking to Dr. Kingsly Ambrose. He’s a professor at Purdue University, Biomechanical Engineering kind of background, and then getting into specifically the feed and grain industry. But then again, zooming in, especially on dust and dust explosions.
Yeah, particulate level is kind of his expertise. And so, every year he puts out a report about the incidents around combustible dust, a number of explosions and fatalities. And I hope we can get a zero report.
Yeah, that’s what we’re really looking forward to in the long term is the year that he publishes it and says zero incidents, zero injuries, zero deaths. And that’s what we want to be a part of as we’re producing equipment to help out in that space. But yeah, I mean, we have read his articles here on camera, probably, we’ve been doing this almost two years now. So, probably both years that we’ve been doing it. And it is interesting to see the different trends over the 10-year period, but then he also zooms out and says, like, this is all time data that we’ve got and calls out the states and the industries that need to be better.
So, hopefully his report will become obsolete. And speaking of obsolete, we kind of got a new core target for SonicAire. It’s kind of a vision statement. So, we have been for years now talking about like the number of square feet we want to eventually cover with SonicAire fans. And that’s just, it’s not super inspiring and doesn’t motivate anyone I don’t think.
No, I mean, like at the end of the day, like you can back into it. And that’s just a revenue number. And that’s not what we’re about here, right? We’re doing this as an education piece because we want people to be safe in the industry, and we want to protect the lives that our fans and the other equipment are getting out to. And so, we did zoom out and we said like what is going to inspire us to do that?
Yeah. So, and we believe that is to make overhead combustible dust cleaning. Nope. Make overhead fugitive dust cleaning obsolete. It’s new. We’re still learning it ourselves. It’s six words; you would think I could get it right every time. But yeah, to make overhead fugitive dust cleaning obsolete. So, if we can do that, and does that mean, you know, it’s kind of like the horse and buggy. Could you ride a horse and buggy to work today? Yeah, you absolutely could. But it’s obsolete. And you probably didn’t come to work that way. So, the same thing with air wands and getting up into lifts and doing overhead cleaning. We want to make that completely obsolete. A thing in the past. That doesn’t mean you’ll never see one, but the way of the future is using technology like SonicAire fans.
Yeah. And I mean, I’m really excited about this. I was always the one that kind of was like, I don’t love our old core target. But no, I am super excited to get behind this. I think this helps us drive what SonicAire is and what SonicAire does, because at the end of the day, we have kind of this goal card that says like, is this decision helping to obsolete this fugitive dust cleaning? And it’s a yes or no. And if it’s yes, we’re going to pursue it. We’re going to pursue it head on. And if it’s no, it’s like, we need to focus on our objective.
That’s right. So we are what we’re about. All right. Enough about us. Let’s jump into the interview. Without any further ado, here is Dr. Kingsly Ambrose from Purdue University.
All right. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Kingsly Ambrose. Thank you so much for joining us today. It’s a pleasure to be able to connect and have you on here. We’ve seen so much of your work and your articles and your reports that you’ve produced about combustible dust and in the grain and agriculture industry. And so, welcome. Thanks for being here.
Thank you. Thanks for having me here.
Yeah, I’m really excited. We were talking just before we started recording, like we’re a little bit of a fanboy because we get the article on kind of the year end results. It’s not a fun thing to read necessarily because we’re not at the point where we’re at zero explosions or anything, but it is always helpful for us being in the industry to know like, what’s the trend? Are we getting better? Was this year worse? Like, what industries specifically have been impacted, or like what technology changes have introduced like the biggest change? So yeah, we’re always excited to see the article that comes out each year, seeing how we’ve moved through that. So, thank you so much for your work. I mean, just to start off with.
Thank you. Thanks. You know, as we talked before, that’s again, one of my passions, to work on preventing dust explosions. Hopefully down the road, we might reach zero explosions.
Yeah. It would be nice to have that kind of report to write in a year. That would be pretty, pretty easy.
Yes.
We can celebrate that one. When you write that one.
Definitely. Yeah.
So how did you get into that? Like at what point did you go, Ah, dust, like that’s where I’m going to focus my research on. And that’s what gets me excited to wake up in the mornings. Sure. You know, when I started my faculty role at Kansas State 16 years ago, you might have heard a name, Dr. Bob Sheff. He used to work on gathering, you know, dust explosion data in the US. And he has developed, you know, deadly dust videos when he was active, you know, in his research and teaching, et cetera. So, when I started as a faculty at K State and I saw that no one was working in that area. Again, I thought, you know, it’s very important work that has been discontinued. So, I thought, jumping in on that will help the industry and also keep the workers safe and also the overall industry safe.
It’s not a new or unfamiliar area of work for me. So, my expertise is in particle technology. So, I work on particles and powders and, you know, naturally dust comes into that domain of particle technology. So, it’s kind of natural interest. And I believe it is important we continue this work.
Yeah, you talk about your time at K State. Our founder, Brad, grew up in Wichita and is from the Kansas area. And so, he remembers growing up as a farm boy. Grain elevators just exploding. And you would hear news about it every summer. And it was just kind of a, uh, you know, to a teenager or whatever, it was just kind of a natural occurrence. They were, oh yeah, lost another one. And, you know, tragic. And I’m so glad that, that folks like you are working to kind of bring this information to light and put it out there.
I mean, I was thumbing through your report. I mean, we’re still talking about a large number of explosions every single year. The average is still eight and a half explosions every year.
Yeah. Still happening. So again, you know, random explosions here and there, some are major, some are minor, but you know, unfortunately it’s still happening. Some years it’s going down. Some years it’s going up. That makes me wonder, are we doing the right thing to stop these explosions?
Yeah. What do you think kind of the mindset is right now, or the culture is around the state of safety and dust safety, particularly in the agriculture industry? What’s the awareness level? What do you think is going on?
I do think people are aware, like industries are aware of dust explosion incidents, but there are multiple reasons. You would have visited many newer, you know, recently constructed grain elevators and grain processing facilities. You will see they have all the safety precautions, everything in place, you know, sensors and most of the safety, including dust collection systems in place. But unfortunately, many of our grain elevators and grain processing facilities are 50 years old, 70 years old, you know, which is difficult to retrofit, with all the safety features and safety sensors, or even dust collection systems, etc., in those old facilities. I’ve been to a facility that’s more than 100 years old. So, yeah, how do you take care of that facility? So, awareness is there. And again, the second challenge is again, our grain business, especially grain handling business, it’s more volume based. So, you don’t have a lot of people working in those grain facilities. So, the number of workers within the facilities are limited. So obviously, you focus on production and profit rather than safety. Safety usually falls behind when it comes to running daily operations. So, multiple challenges. Hopefully we can overcome those one by one down the road.
Yeah, we were talking about safety recently. And how companies like to say safety first, safety first, and put that on the banners and the signs. But ultimately safety is hopefully second, but usually it’s somewhere that there’s production and there’s the financial implications and then safety if we can afford to be safe and still do the same thing.
Yeah. And it’s interesting that you point out the age of the facilities, because even in your report, like you look at kind of the rolling average over the last 10 years, but then you also say like, Hey, this is what’s been happening for almost the last 100 years. And it’s just like, at what point are we going to be able to say like, Oh, there’s a problem. Like we tried to make all of these little incremental tweaks along the way, but we still haven’t been able to pivot. Like, you know, there’s an innovation. Like how do you make a facility that doesn’t have the opportunity to explode or something? So, where do you see us kind of pushing or pioneering past like, Hey, we’ve just got to upfit this hundred year facility over and over and over again. How do you see us kind of making progress in that way?
Usually, again, implementing more safety features, and you guys know better, more and more safety tools. There are, again, explosion protection options, but most of these protection options reduce the magnitude of explosion rather than finding it and preventing. So that’s why we still have the problem of explosions happening and many, many facilities rely on explosion protection options, but what about the safety features that will warn us when there is a problem? If you have some kind of technology techniques or awareness to learn to stop the explosions before it happens, that would be more beneficial to the industry than even…You know, we touched on the financial implications, right? So, these dust explosion protection options don’t come cheap. And many of the technologies don’t come cheap. So, where should we focus on? My idea again is focused from the ground. So, you know, keep the place clean. Start from there and then move on one by one to the advanced features of minimizing the effect from dust explosions.
Mm hmm. So, you talk about warning signs and things like that and indicators. I read that you developed a dust particle sensor. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Yes. So, when I started working as I briefly mentioned, now, there are dust explosion suppression systems, your panels, etc. But as I said, there are no signs or no technology that can find out, are we at the minimum explosive concentration level? That’s one of the factors that we always see. There are a couple of thumb rules most industry use, but it’s not a regulation or a standard that we can use. So, we thought, okay, why not, you know, most of our facilities are working in well-lit conditions. So why not use light to find the amount of dust in here. So that’s how this technology came in, using light extinction and finding the dust’d minimum explosive concentration. So, if you know that we are very close to a major problem, then that will help shut down the facility or clean the place, etc.
Yeah, that’s great. We need more warning signs.
Yeah. And some of the struggle with it is like we do a lot of this prevention stuff. And even if you look at, like we’ve been focused on, like the last 10 years, we’ve seen the number of explosive events starting to decline a little bit. But we’re seeing that fatalities are still kind of staying flat. Can you talk a little bit about why that is, how we’re managing that in a both/and type situation?
That’s a good point that you touched upon. Again, the mitigation options are the suppression systems, vending systems will help, you know, prevent this number of deaths, number of injuries in a facility. But again, as we touched upon, many facilities may not have these options too, right? So, they may not have dust explosion suppression systems or events, et cetera. So, if there is an explosion occurring in those facilities, the chances of people getting injured or even dead are much higher.
You can see like the past two year data, like 2024, the number of explosions were high, but the number of deaths and injuries, number of death was zero, but, you know, injuries was much lower. But in 2025, the number of explosions were slow, but the number of people died and the number of injuries went up. So, we should have technologies from ground till the end, to have a completely 100 percent safe place.
Yeah. In some of those instances, one of the issues that we’re seeing is like, even in the reports and the digging through after the event occurs, we can’t pinpoint necessarily what the cause was. Can you touch on that a little bit? And like the process of A, identifying it, but then B, how we get to the end and can’t say this is how the event unfolded.
Again, great question. So, as you said, when you go back and see the probable source of ignition, we will not be able to find almost like 70, 80 percent. So, the explosions are so intense that it kind of destroys everything. You cannot go back and see how it started. But there are other common ignition sources that we can try and avoid as much as possible. But finding ignition sources later is always a challenge. So, keeping our safety system in place is much easier than finding the root cause or probable cause, what happened, why it happened, etc. Many of those incidents again, you know very well, it doesn’t take a lot of time for an explosion to occur. It’s very difficult if you have some ignition then, you know, potentially stopping that from spreading into a major explosion.
So, what should plant leaders or facility managers, what’s the one takeaway from all your research and everything that you’ve studied, like starting today, do this. If you can do nothing else, start with this. Like where should they begin and what should they focus on?
You know, the first basic thing should be keeping the place clean, right? So, if we keep the place clean, no suspended dust, no deposited dust, then almost 100% of the time we can avoid an explosion. But there are other steps they should take. Again, training is very important. As we discussed, most of the employees are aware of explosions, but I can give you an example. I used to do this dust explosion prevention training programs through the US, mostly in the Midwest US. In one of the training programs, I had a worker who came to me and thought, oh, he never knew that dust could explode. So still, many of them are aware, but still, we need to keep up with the training. More importantly, training the contract workers is also important.
Yeah, that’s a big point.
Many of the ignition sources, we talked about ignition sources, right? So, it has happened from cutting and welding work, which are often done by contract workers rather than a facility employee. Again, the last option, I’m not ignoring it, but having safety sensors, having dust explosion suppression systems, dust explosion protection options is also very important to keep the explosion incidents down. I’ll just briefly touch upon this. You know, I’ve been to some facilities where there have been some minor explosions, but they never report. If it’s a minor explosion, no major damage, nothing happened, then it never comes out. But again, having those safety options will help in not creating a major explosion, but keep them to a minor, localized explosion. But those incidents usually are not reported in the annual report.
So how do you encourage those facilities in kind of your work in your research, but then also like being involved in those areas where there was a minor explosion or something, how do you encourage those facilities to be like, Hey, you got a freebie. You got a get out of jail free card in this instance. But like, you’ve got to take this for real. You’ve got to be serious about this because you were, you were very close to being a number on my report. So how do you encourage those facilities or plant leaders or contract workers to get involved with this?
Yeah. I used to train many workers, people on preventing dust explosions. We briefly touched upon this, right? One of the major challenges is financial implications. But, you know, if they have money, they tend to do some safety systems or install safety systems. But many times, as we discussed, most of the time financial inputs are focused on production and profit rather than the safety system. So, I try to encourage them on training. Many of the larger corporations have this annual safety trainings, but they still need some dust explosion prevention safety programs or like targeted programs in general safety, you know, keeping up with general safety requirements. Keep educating everyone.
I think your point about contractors is a big deal. I think that easily gets missed. I think, you know, thinking about some of the larger locations and facilities that we’ve been in, you know, that they spend a lot of time training their employees and making them aware of the hazards. But when it comes to, you know, contractors and outside workers, they probably hit it real quickly as they come in the door, you know, here’s where the exits are. Wear safety glasses, wear steel toe boots. Oh, by the way, dust is combustible, and get to work because we got stuff for you to do.
Here’s our 10 minute video, sign this sheet. Don’t sue us.
Yeah. But we’re talking about a hazard that could be catastrophic. Absolutely catastrophic and just life changing for many people. And so, I think you raise an excellent point about the need for more contractor safety training.
Yeah, absolutely. We talk about culture a lot. And so, we see those kinds of things even on that front where it’s like, when someone is new to your environment, they don’t necessarily know the rules of engagement or like, how we understand risk or culture or whatever it may be. And so just making sure that like, when you are welcoming someone in that they are fully welcome, right? Like these are the expectations because I want my folks to go home safe. I want you to have a great time here and do your job well and be successful. But like, these are the rules of engagement.
All right. So based on your research, your education and all the prevention efforts that you’ve put into this, where do you see it going next? Where are we headed now?
You know, it’s a great question. Our goal, your interest, my interest is almost the same: to reduce the number of explosions, right? How do we do that? You know, again, there is no one simple solution or simple answer, but I believe everyone should work to put dust explosion protection industry. Grain handling facilities, grain handling industry, research academia, you know, we can work together. Probably we can bring down the number of incidents. I would say a little bit increased focus on safety aspects will go a long way.
And many facilities and many corporations know that if an explosion occurs, the damages are huge, you know, can run hundreds of millions of dollars, from court litigations, damaged facility, lost production time, etc. Compared to that, following a safety precaution or safety standard is much easier. So instead of losing all this money, I’m just throwing out a number, it’s not the exact but if you spend like $50,000, maybe you can down the road, you can save like $750 million or something like that. So that kind of change in mindset is needed when it comes to dust explosions.
Yeah, I would say safety is the best investment you can make.
Definitely, yes.
Yeah, I think a lot of what you’re saying today, and then even what your research points to is like, we can have all of the standards, we can have all of the particle sensors or the safety tools or the explosion mitigation, but if we are not training our people to take it seriously, then it’s all for naught. Like, yes, the investment is large, but if we’re not going to, you know, follow the processes and procedures that are put in place around it, that investment is for naught, and we’re going to lose even in a larger scale down the road.
Yeah, people need to care and they need to understand why and why they need to care. And so, that is all wrapped up in that education piece you’re talking about.
Just to add to it, we talked about warning signs, right? So, one of the things that I touch upon in my training is, do not ignore any warning signs. Many places, we have the tendency, to see if you hear, if you smell, you know, we usually ignore it, okay, it’s not my problem. You know how that can be. But I usually touch upon doing my training, never ignore any kind of warning signs. It could be a mechanical warning sign, a noise, a different smell, etc. So that’s again, very important. Many places, many times, incidents could have been avoided or could have been avoided if we listen to those ones.
Wise words.
Yeah. Well, hey, thank you so much for again, just like what you’re doing and putting into the field. I know you’ve made a major impact on us by getting us the data, because a lot of times we don’t have the exposure. Because like you said, people don’t want to talk about this thing. So yeah, we’re very thankful for the research that you’re doing, and how you’re impacting the field. But then again, thank you for taking the time to talk to us today. Where can people find you and your research and the articles that you’re putting out?
Once again, thank you for having me here. So, our department web page, or my individual research web page will have all the details, the compiled dust reports, the educational materials and dust explosion prevention, common ignition sources, PowerPoints, etc, that I developed for OSHA, are available on the website for free to download. It’s free to download. Industries can use it for their own training purposes, too.
Great.
Excellent.
I love free. That’s right.
Especially when it’s going to help us out. We’ll make sure that Kevin gets a link into our videos and everything so that we can find those things. But yeah, thanks again so much.
Thank you.
Yeah, this is great. Kingsly, thank you for being a part of this podcast and, as Taylor said, the work you’re doing to make the world a safer place. So, we look forward to reading that report when it has a zero on it.
Hopefully. That’s my goal. Thank you very much. Thank you.
Absolutely. So, thanks for listening. Thanks for joining. We’ll see you next time on the OnAire Podcast.