Abstract
Burning characteristics of electrical cables are one of the key parameters for the fire hazard assessment of nuclear power plants (NPPs) since the cables are the essential sources of fire in the plants. A three-dimensional (3-D) transient computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code-FDS is adopted in this paper to simulate these characteristics related to the cable burning. Being one of the NRC licensing fire codes, the FDS includes the thermal-hydraulic equations, the turbulence model and the chemical combustion model, etc. In order to assess the CFD fire models used in this code, a burning test using the control cable with the outer jacket of polyvinylchloride (PVC) and the inner insulation of cross-linked polyethylene (XLPE) is conducted. The measured parameters associated with the burning characteristics include the heat release rate (HRR), O 2 depletion, and CO and CO 2 production, etc. Except the amount of O 2 consumption, the predicted transient behaviors of other parameters can reproduce the measured data. Based on the chemical combustion model in the FDS code, this discrepancy may be essentially resulted from the default value of hydrogen fraction (H frac ) contained in the soot since the soot yield for the burning of PVC material is high enough that the uncertainty in the H frac value has a prominent effect on the amount of O 2 consumption. This explanation can be confirmed by a benchmark calculation for simulating a burning test with the polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) fuel of low-soot yield. The present simulation works can provide the useful information for the plant staff or the researcher as they would perform the fire hazard analysis in the NPPs using the FDS code. © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.