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A Comparative study on fire hazards of cables used in nuclear power plants based on small- and large-scale experiments

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Abstract

Cables are the most common combustibles in nuclear power plants (NPPs) and cable fires are the one of main threaten to the safety of NPPs. Fire characteristics and fire hazards for two typical cables used in NPPs were comparatively studied based on cone calorimeter and cable tray fire tests. The heat release rate (HRR) curves show different patterns, two-peaks and three-peaks for NPP and conventional flame retardant cables, respectively. This difference is attributed to the fire barrier, which distinguishes the burning of sheath and insulation. Moreover, the maximum value of HRR for conventional flame retardant cable is much higher than NPP flame-retardant cable, and the difference is 108 kW m−2. The time from first peak to second peak for NPP flame-retardant cable is approximately four times as conventional flame retardant cable. Based on cable tray fire, the burning time after burner off is much longer for conventional flame retardant cable and its total mass loss is 0.52 kg, which are three times and five times as much as NPP flame-retardant cable, respectively, and it has a self-sustaining stage during cable burning. The above indicates that the NPP flame-retardant cable has less sustained damage, fire development rate and overall fire hazard. In addition, spacing has little effect on the burning time of sheath, but the burning of insulation layer is promoted, the time from first peak to second peak decreases with the increase in spacing. However, the influence of spacing is non-monotonous in cable tray fire, and the burning of cables with 10 mm spacing has higher fire hazard with a maximum mass loss rate.

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Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully the financial supports from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 52074202, 52104211), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (WUT: 2021IVA204), and the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (No. BK20201030).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Safety Science and Emergency Management, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan, 430070, China

    Kaixuan Tang, Ying Zhang, Changwei Li, Chuyuan Ma, Ganghua Liu, Hongming Zhang & Bihe Yuan

  2. China Ship Development and Design Center, Wuhan, 430064, China

    Shuai Jiang

  3. School of Environmental and Chemical Engineering, Jiangsu Ocean University, Lianyungang, 222005, China

    Hongming Zhang

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  1. Kaixuan Tang
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by KT, YZ and BY. The first draft of the manuscript was written by KT and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Bihe Yuan.

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Tang, K., Zhang, Y., Jiang, S. et al. A Comparative study on fire hazards of cables used in nuclear power plants based on small- and large-scale experiments. J Therm Anal Calorim 147, 14659–14671 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10973-022-11578-z

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