Engineers from the University of California, Riverside have developed an open-source computer program for preventing explosions, fires and injuries incurred by mixing incompatible chemicals together.

The program, called ChemStor, informs users when chemicals are incompatible and, when mixed together, can lead to hazards such as an explosion or fire.

To develop the program, the team of engineers used a computer science approach dubbed graph coloring register allocation wherein chemicals are color-coded and arranged so that adjacent data points (nodes) sharing an edge cannot share the same color. This approach takes inspiration from U.S. maps where no two adjoining states will share the same color so as to delineate the boundaries.

To develop the chart, ChemStor culled data from an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) database with information on 9,800 different chemicals. Once identified, the chemicals were color-coded and arranged into reactivity groups and a chemical interaction graph emerged based on those groups. Next, ChemStor assigned each chemical group color to a storage or waste container where chemicals of the same color can be stored without hazard, whereas chemicals with different colors cannot.

ChemStor’s developers are attempting to make the program more user-friendly and expect to add an accompanying smartphone app that relies on the smartphone camera to gather data on chemicals and storage containers.

The system is detailed in the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling.