Publications Details
Packaging performance evaluation and performance oriented packaging standards for large packages for poison inhalation hazard materials
The U.S. Department of Transportation Research & Special Programs Administration (DOT-RSPA) has sponsored a project at Sandia National Laboratories to evaluate the protection provided by current packagings used for truck and rail transport of materials that have been classified as Poison Inhalation Hazards (PIH) and to recommend performance standards for these PIH packagings. Hazardous materials span a wide range of toxicity and there are many parameters used to characterize toxicity; for any given hazardous material, data are not available for all of the possible toxicity parameters. Therefore, it was necessary to select a toxicity criterion to characterize all of the PIH compounds (a value of the criterion was derived from other parameters in many cases) and to calculate their dispersion in the event of a release resulting from a transportation accident. Methodologies which account for material toxicity and dispersal characteristics were developed as a major portion of this project and applied to 72 PIH materials. This report presents details of the PIH material toxicity comparisons, calculation of their dispersion, and their classification into five severity categories. 16 refs., 5 figs., 7 tabs.