Horizontal cable tray fire in a well‐confined and mechanically ventilated enclosure using a two‐zone model

Electrical cable trays are used in large quantities in nuclear power plants (NPPs) and are one of the main potential sources of fire. A malfunction of electrical equipment due to thermal stress for instance may lead to the loss of important safety functions of the NPPs. The investigation of such fires in a confined and mechanically ventilated enclosure has been scarce up to now and limited to nuclear industry. In the scope of the OECD PRISME‐2 project, the Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire (IRSN) conducted more than a dozen fire tests involving horizontal electrical cable trays burning either in open atmosphere or inside mechanically ventilated compartments to investigate this topic. A semi‐empirical model of horizontal cable tray fires in a well‐confined and mechanically ventilated enclosure was developed. This model is partly based on the approach used in FLASH‐CAT and on experimental findings from IRSN cables fire tests. It was implemented in the two‐zone model SYLVIA. The major features of the compartment fire experiments could then be reproduced with acceptable error, except for combustion of unburned gases. The development of such a semi‐empirical model is a common practice in fire safety engineering concerned with complex solid fuels.     

Cable tray FIRE tests simulations in open atmosphere and in confined and mechanically ventilated compartments with the CALIF3S/ISIS CFD software

Fire hazard in nuclear power plants (NPPs) is particularly often investigated as potential cause of safety equipment failure and confinement loss. Many fire events recorded in NPPs involve electric cables, widely used throughout facilities. IRSN is developing the CALIF3S/ISIS computational fluid dynamics software devoted to fire simulation in large‐scale confined and mechanically ventilated compartments. This paper presents two aspects of the CALIF3S/ISIS code ability to simulate fires. The first one concerns vertical and horizontal spreading of a cable tray fire in open atmosphere using an approach based on the FLASH‐CAT cable fire spread model. Resorting to the suitable parameters of the FLASH‐CAT model based on video fire analyses of tests enables to properly compute the heat release rate of the fire. The second aspect concerns the ability to simulate the evolution and consequences of fires in confined and mechanically ventilated compartments. For these cases, the heat release rate measured during the corresponding experiment is used as input data for the calculations. The predicted evolutions of pressure or gas temperatures are in relatively good accordance with the experiments. The major discrepancy concerns gas concentrations in the fire room which is attributed to a lack of information about the properties of the fuel material.     

Fire spread from an open‐doors electrical cabinet to neighboring targets in a confined and mechanically ventilated facility

Electrical cabinet fire is one of the main fire hazards in nuclear power plants. As part of the OECD PRISME‐2 programme, four fire tests were carried out to investigate the fire spread from an open‐doors electrical cabinet to overhead cable trays and adjacent cabinets in a confined and mechanically ventilated facility. These tests, named CFS‐5 to CFS‐7 and CORE‐6, used same both cabinet (fire source) and three overhead cable trays. The trays were filled with a halogenated flame‐retardant cable‐type for CFS‐5 and one halogen‐free for the three other tests. Moreover, fire dampers were used for CFS‐7 test while CORE‐6 test implemented two additional cabinets adjacent to the fire source. Measurements such as flame and gas temperature, gas concentration, mass loss rate, and heat release rate were performed for investigating the fire spread. Cabinet fire spread to the cable trays for CFS‐5 and CFS‐6 tests. Three fast and short cable tray fires were shown for CFS‐5, while a slow and long cable tray fire was highlighted for CFS‐6. In contrast, the fire dampers shutdown for CFS‐7 test prevented ignition of the overhead cables. Furthermore, for CORE‐6 test, cabinet fire spread to the adjacent cabinets, but the upper cables were not ignited.     

Cable tray fire tests with halogenated electric cables in a confined and mechanically ventilated facility

Cable fires are one of the main fire hazards present in nuclear power plants (NPPs). Therefore, as part of the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD) PRISME‐2 project, cable tray fire tests were performed both in open atmosphere conditions and in a confined and mechanically ventilated facility, called DIVA. These tests aim at showing the effects of a confined and ventilated environment on fire characteristics and consequences. This study deals with five fire tests, which used halogenated (poly [vinyl chloride] or PVC) cable types. Two tests were carried out in open atmosphere and three tests in the DIVA facility. The latter used a ventilation renewal rate (VRR) of either 4 or 15 h^?1. The confined and ventilated conditions reduced the mass loss rate and heat release rate than did those obtained in open atmosphere. Furthermore, the three confined tests produced unburnt gases, which ignited in the fire room. Two explosions were highlighted for the tests that used a VRR of 4 h^?1. These explosions indeed led to fast flame propagations over the entire upper part of the fire room and steep overpressures of almost 150 hPa. The low‐qualified PVC cables and the ventilation set‐up used in this study strongly contributed to the occurrence of these explosions.     

Cable tray fire tests in a confined and mechanically ventilated facility

Cable fires are one of the main fire hazards in nuclear power plants. As part of the cable fire spreading (CFS) campaign of the OECD PRISME‐2 programme, 3 real‐scale cable tray fire tests were performed in open atmosphere (1 CFS support test, named CFSS‐2) and in a confined and mechanically ventilated facility (2 CFS tests, named CFS‐3 and CFS‐4). This study aims at investigating the effects of confined and ventilated conditions on cable tray fires that used a halogen‐free flame retardant cable‐type. The CFS‐3 and CFS‐4 tests involved 2 ventilation renewal rates of 4 and 15 h^?1, respectively. The confined conditions lead to decrease the fire growth rate and the peaks of mass loss rate and heat release rate, compared with open atmosphere. The reductions are larger for the lower ventilation renewal rate. Furthermore, it is shown that the CFS‐4 test may be classified as a well‐ventilated fire and the CFS‐3 test as an under‐ventilated fire. For this last one, its fire characteristics and its consequences in the fire room highlight an oscillatory behaviour, with the same low frequency, for about 30 minutes. These oscillations arise from successive combustions of unburnt gases.     

Evaluation of the room smoke filling time for fire plumes: Influence of the room geometry

The article examines numerically and theoretically the effects of room aspect ratio on the fire smoke filling process. It aims to evaluate the two-zone models used in fire safety engineering to predict the smoke filling times. Using Fire Dynamics Simulator, numerical simulations are performed and compared to a simplified zone model. The results show that the two-zone model overestimates the smoke filling time in the case of a compartment with a large surface area. To improve the predictions of two-zone models, simple correlations are established for the duration of the phenomena occurring before the formation of a two-layer stratification in a fire compartment. These new correlations allow the zone model to be significantly improved.     

New approaches to determine the interface height of fire smoke based on a three-layer zone model and its verification in large confined space

Large confined space has high incidence of fires, which seriously threatens the safety of people working there. Understanding the distribution of smoke in such large space is critical to fire development prediction and smoke control. Three improved methods for the stratification interface prediction of fire smoke are developed, including of improved intra-variance, integral ratio and N-percentage methods. In these methods, the interface height is determined by the vertical temperature distribution based on a three-layer smoke zone model, which is an improvement of a two-layer zone model. Thereafter, the three improved methods are applied to several typical fire cases simulated CFD to predict the smoke interface, and their applicability and reliability are verified by comparison of the smoke stratification results with the filed simulation results. Results show that the three improved methods can effectively determine the location of the three-layer zone model's interface, and they have the ability to predict smoke interface for fires with different fire source types and ventilation conditions.     

油品火灾形势分析

文章根据《中国消防年鉴》对近年油品火灾起数、造成人员伤亡、直接财产损失、起火原因等情况进行分析,揭示油品火灾的特点和规律,分析油品消防安全工作的薄弱环节和重点方向。并对今后如何做好油品消防安全工作提出对策和建议。     

Apron design for protecting double‐skin façade fires

Although double‐skin façade (DSF) is an environmental‐friendly architectural feature, its fire behaviour is a deep concern. The interior glass system including the glass pane, metal frame and associated accessories will be hotter than the exterior glass system as demonstrated by earlier studies. The glass pane above the fire room will be broken to spread flame into the upper compartment. Aprons are proposed to protect the air cavity of DSF in a way similar to those outside a single‐skin façade. In this paper, the effect of aprons in protecting against fire spread from an underlying compartment to the compartments above by preventing glass breakage of the inner glass pane was studied. Fire and smoke from a post‐flashover room fire adjacent to the DSF would be trapped in the air cavity between the two glass panes. Spreading of hot gases with different apron widths was studied by numerical simulations with CFD first. Fire environment with and without breaking the apron immediately above the fire room was studied. Full‐scale burning tests on part of an experimental DSF rig were then carried out to demonstrate the performance of horizontal apron in the DSF rig of 6 m tall and air cavity depth of 2 m with different apron widths. All demonstrated that providing apron is appropriate in protecting DSF fires. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Hazards of combustion products: Toxicity,opacity, corrosivity,and heat release: The experts' views on capability and issues

The science of understanding how fires burn and how heat smoke and gases are generated and affect people has progressed substantially in the last half century. The principles of facility design for life safety in fires have reached a degree of maturity. Standards and code provisions for fire detection, suppression and control have become the norm. Real‐scale (or nearly real‐scale) test methods for the flammability of furnishings and interior finish have been established. In addition, some tests have been developed that measure the results of the burning of a small sample from the finished product. Yet, while there have been numerous small‐scale apparatuses developed for assessing the generation of heat, toxic gases, and visible or corrosive smoke, these facets of life and property safety have not found widespread inclusion in building and fire codes. There has been an invigorated effort in ISO TC92 SC3, Fire Threat to People and the Environment, to develop a coherent and comprehensive set of fire safety standards and guidance documents for life safety. Smaller efforts are ongoing within some national and regional standards bodies. In November 2008, experts in this field gathered at The Royal Society in London to hear papers that captured the state of the art and to discuss where we might go from here. This paper summarizes the papers and the discussion from that meeting. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Characterization of the fire environments in central offices of the telecommunications industry

Eight free burning and two sprinklered fire tests were performed with electrical cable trays and live digital switch racks in a large enclosure to simulate telecommunications central office (TCO) fires started by electrical overheating. Very‐slow‐growing (non‐flaming), slower‐growing (partially flaming) and low‐intensity‐faster‐growing (flaming) fires releasing gray‐white, gray, and black smoke, respectively, were observed in the tests. Under quiescent conditions present in the unvented enclosure fire tests for cables, very‐slow‐growing fires were detected in about 1452 s, whereas the slower‐growing fires were detected in about 222 s by commercial fire detectors. Under ventilation conditions typical of TCOs, detection times were very similar for the five types of commercial TCOs fire detectors used in the tests. The average detection times for slower‐growing fires (cable fires) and low‐intensity‐faster‐growing fires (digital switch rack fires) were 242±17% and 249±11%s respectively. The TCO procedures to reduce smoke damage from fires (on fire detection, inlet ventilation flow is turned off and exhaust flow is turned on) were found to be beneficial. The extent of smoke damage decreased significantly with an increase in the exhaust flow rate. The chloride ion mass deposition suggested that equipment recovery would be possible in the smoke environment if the cable vapor concentration could be reduced below about 3 g/m³. The metal corrosion rate was found proportional to the 0.6th power of the smoke concentration, similar to that found for the corrosion of metal surfaces exposed to aqueous solutions of HCl and HNO₃ and for acid rain with no protective layer at the surface. Sprinkler water was found to wash down the smoke deposits on the surfaces with little indication of corrosion enhancement. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Burning behavior of cable tray located on a wall with different cable arrangements

Cable fire risk analysis is important for fire protection design in nuclear power plants, where multiple horizontal cable trays are mostly located on the walls. Fire experiments using three cable trays with different cable arrangements were conducted in a confined room to investigate the burning behavior of a cable tray on a wall. A corner was formed by the side wall and the cable tray. Hot smoke emitted from the burning cable was trapped in the corner and then ignited the cable on the bottom surface of the upper cable tray. It is found that for cables densely packed together, spread of flame on the bottom surface of cable tray was clearly observed and increased the mass loss of cable burning during the growth stage of a cable tray fire. For cables arranged further apart, vertical propagation from the bottom tray to the top tray was fast and dominated the mass loss of cable burning.     

Fire hazard assessment for a green railway station

A green railway station adopting natural ventilation was built in Hong Kong to promote sustainable architectural design. Similar to many other green or sustainable projects, such design failed to comply with the local fire safety codes. There are potential fire hazards due to the adopted green features. Better ventilation provision would supply more air to burn the combustibles in case of fire. Performance‐based design was applied using the timeline analysis to determine the fire safety provisions. In this paper, fire simulations were carried out to predict the available safe egress time (ASET) under low design fires with smoke toxicity including only the carbon monoxide concentration. Evacuation simulations were conducted to predict the required safe egress time (RSET) under low passenger loadings. Studies on human behaviour under big fires and heavy passenger loadings were not included. Problems to be encountered in this green railway station using the timeline analysis will be pointed out in this paper. ASET was estimated by computational fluid dynamics with bigger fires resulted from the green features. RSET was estimated by evacuation software under local passenger loadings. The results indicated that ASET are less than RSET under big fires with heavy passenger loadings. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Effect of the nature of fuel on the characteristics of fully developed compartment fires

The coupling between the constituent reactions of a burning process, namely pyrolysis, combustion of volatiles, and (possibly) oxidation of char, is on the whole quite different for fires occurring in the open and for those that develop in an enclosure. Consequently, knowledge of the characteristics of free burning fires is of only limited value in studies related to compartment fire. Since the singe-rout communication between the fire compartment and its environment, always assumed in classical fire studies, is not at all common in real world fires, great sophistication in the mathematical modeling of classical fires is rarely warranted. An examination of pool-like fires and pile fires of noncharring fuels has shown that the severity of such fires in the fire compartment, as characterized by the so-called ‘fire severity product’, decreases slightly with an increase in ventilation. The principal danger presented by these fires, however, is not so much to the fire compartment itself as to the surrounding spaces. An interesting feature of fires involving charring fuels, cellulosies in particular, is that the rate of consumption of fuel, the so-called ‘rate of burning’, is practically independent of all process variables except ventilation. The severity of fires of cellulosics is, as a rule, much higher than that of fires of noncharring fuels. It exhibits a maximum at relatively low ventilations. From the point of view of spread of fire to the surrounding spaces, cellulosics are generally less dangerous than noncharring plastics. Fires involving cellulosics mixed with smaller amounts of noncharring plastics can be characterized as basically cellulosics fires, with a superimposed initial period of very high spread liability.     

Third International Conference on Environmentally Friendly Fire-Retardant Systems

The Third International Conference on Fire Retardancy of Polymeric Materials was held in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, on December 7–8, 1993. The conference focused upon the latest developments in zero- and lowhalogen additives and polymers used to minimize flammability, smoke, fume, and toxicity problems. This was an intensive and executive-level meeting for compounders and technical specialists using fire retardants (FR) in plastics, textiles, wire and cable, and furniture applications; business development managers who follow specialty chemical and additive markets; health, safety, insurance, and regulatory affairs managers; and materials, equipment, and testing/measurement specialists in the fire safety industry. An exhibition of fire retardant additives and instruments was arranged within the framework of the conference. The participants took this opportunity to discuss their needs with the exhibitors and to discover new sources of equipment, materials, and services.     

Experimental study of smoke effects on energized electrical cabinets located nearby a lubricant oil pool fire

This paper presents an experimental study of smoke exposure effects on potential malfunction of three electrical cabinets located nearby an oil pool fire. This study was performed as part of the PRISME‐2 international OECD project. Lubricant oil was used as fire source, and three real energized electrical cabinets were used as targets exposed to smoke in the adjacent room to the fire room. The main fire properties, as well as the fire consequences, such as gas temperatures and smoke concentrations in the rooms, and the cabinets are presented in detail. The heat release rate was thus assessed at around 500 kW for nearly all the fire duration, and maximum gas temperatures reached 300°C in the fire room, and 120°C in the adjacent room. Moreover, the maximum gas temperatures and soot mass concentrations inside the cabinets ranged from 90 to 120°C and from 0.3 to 1 g/m³, respectively. Nevertheless, continuous electrical monitoring of the three cabinets did not highlight malfunction. After the experiment, monitoring test of the cabinets was conducted to investigate the potential effects. The isolation resistance of electrical circuits on the most severe smoke exposed cabinet reduced during the monitoring test. It seemed the soot deposition have caused it.     

Use of the ARGOS fire risk analysis model for studying chinese restaurant fires

The fire risk in Chinese restaurants in Hong Kong is analyzed using the ARGOS fire risk analysis model developed at the Danish Institute of Fire Technology. A sample size of fifteen Chinese restaurants with different floor areas and fire load densities is considered. Fire simulations are performed for two cases by assuming a PU foam furniture fire occurring in the dining hall and a kerosene fire in the kitchen. Correlations are derived between the floor area and the predicted maximum hot gas temperature, the corresponding smoke layer interface height and the cost of damaged stock in the restaurants. The effectiveness of fire protection systems including sprinkler systems and smoke vents in controlling the fire is also discussed.     

Fire conditions for smoke toxicity measurement

This paper identifies those fire conditions most often present when smoke toxicity is the cause of death. It begins with a review of the evidence that smoke-inhalation deaths are in the majority in fire fatalities in the United States. Next, there is an analysis of the evidence from the national fire experience showing the connection between post-flashover fires and smoke-inhalation deaths. Third is a presentation of real-scale fire test results demonstrating that post-flashover conditions are necessary to produce enough smoke to cause smoke-inhalation deaths in the cases where they actually occur. The fourth component is a sampling of results from computer simulations of fires, affirming and broadening the results from the fire tests. It is concluded that smoke-inhalation deaths occur predominantly after fires have progressed beyond flashover. This conclusion then provides a focus for smoke toxicity measurement in particular and fire hazard mitigation in general.     

Empirical prediction of smoke production in the ISO Room Corner Fire Test by use of ISO Cone Calorimeter Fire Test data

The combustion conditions in the ISO Room Corner Fire Test make it possible to predict full scale smoke production by use of prediction models and bench scale fire test data procured by the ISO Cone Calorimeter Fire Test. The full scale smoke production is governed by the type of material burning only if the rate of heat release is less than 400–600 kW. For higher rates of heat release, the smoke production is more governed by the combustion conditions. The influence of the combustion conditions on the full scale smoke production reduces the possibilities of smoke prediction to materials causing flashover within 10 min in the ISO Room Corner Fire Test. The smoke to heat ratio S_Q (m²MJ) was used to compare smoke production between the scales. In general, the comparison revealed that the smoke yield was significantly less in full scale than in bench scale, especially for the plastics. Plastics do yield more smoke than wood based materials in both scales, but the differences in full scale are not as extreme as indicated by the bench scale smoke data. No simple correlations between the scales seem to exist. Multiple regression studies on empirical smoke prediction models show that bench scale fire parameters can be used to predict full scale fire performance. A quite accurate empirical smoke prediction model is presented for the group of materials which caused flashover within 10 min. The model predicts the full scale rate of smoke production at a rate of heat release of 400 kW. The presented results might be used to assess the fire safety hazard of visible smoke, but benchmarks of smoke hazard do not seem to exist. Thus further studies and agreement on safety levels and principles are needed for general visibility analysis concerning fire safety engineering purposes. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.