An improved model for estimating heat release rate in horizontal cable tray fires in open space

Electric cable fires in nuclear power plants could be disastrous and have to be studied carefully for safety and economic considerations. Based on the results of previous work on large-scale and bench-scale cable fire testing, the Flame Spread over Horizontal Cable Trays model was modified and improved to estimate the heat release rate of large-scale cable fires using bench-scale measured data. The heat release rate per unit area measured in the cone calorimeter experiment is taken as the input, to avoid introducing any prediction uncertainties caused by inconsistent values of the heat of combustion and char yield of the cable. Cable fire experiments with vertical stacks of trays with one to three layers of cables were conducted in open space to assess the accuracy of the improved model. In comparing with the experimental results, predictions using the improved model are encouraging. The local error of prediction is less than 15% and the global error lies between 19.2% and 35.7%. In addition, three cable tray fire experiments with data available in the literature were used to validate the improved model. It is shown that the improved model had good predictions for these cable tray fires.