  Thermal runaway reactions were involved in the Bhopal disaster of 1984, in
which methyl isocyanate was vented from a storage tank of the liquid, and occur
in liquid peroxide explosions, yet to date there have been few investigations
into the mechanism of thermal runaway in such liquid thermoreactive systems.
Consequently protocols for storing thermally unstable liquids and deactivating
liquid bombs may be suboptimal. In this work the hydrolysis of methyl
isocyanate and the thermal decomposition of triacetone triperoxide were
simulated using a gradientless, continuous-flow reactor paradigm. This
approximation enabled stability analyses on the steady state solutions of the
dynamical mass and enthalpy equations. The results indicate that thermal
runaway in both systems is due to the onset of a large amplitude, hard thermal
oscillation initiated at a subcritical Hopf bifurcation. This type of thermal
misbehaviour cannot be predicted using classical ignition theory, and may be
typical of liquid thermoreactive systems. The mechanism of oscillatory thermal
instability on the nanoscale is elucidated.
