1.0 Incident Summary
This incident occurred at Synthron, LLC’s Morganton, North Carolina, facility. The company manufactured a variety of powder coating and paint additives by polymerizing acrylic monomers in a 1,500 gallon reactor.
The company had received an order for slightly more of an additive than the normal size recipe would produce. Plant managers scaled up the recipe to produce the required larger amount of polymer, and added all of the additional monomer needed into the initial charge to the reactor. This more than doubled the rate of energy release in the reactor, exceeding the cooling capacity of the reactor condenser and causing a runaway reaction.