- Author
- Nowlen, S. P.
- Title
- Fire Performance of Aged Electrical Cables.
- Coporate
- Sandia National Labs., Albuquerque, NM
- Report
- SAND 91-0963C, 1991, 9 p.
- Distribution
- Available from National Technical Information Service
- Keywords
- electrical cables | experiments | thermal damage | flammability
- Identifiers
- fire performance; thermally aged; thermal aging
- Abstract
- Sandia National Laboratories has performed a series of experiments under the sponsorship of the U. S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (USNRC) to assess the fire performance of thermally aged electrical cables. Two measures of fire performance were evaluated, namely, (1) the vulnerability of cables to thermal damage and (2) the flammability of cables. In each case, direct comparisons were made between experiments involving unaged (i.e., new off the reel) cables and cables subjected to accelerated thermal aging. The results were evaluated from the perspective of fire risk. It was found that thermal aging did cause changes in the thermal damageability of the cables tested; however, the changes observed are not considered risk significant. Large-scale fire tests demonstrated a clear decrease in material flammability due to thermal aging. Thus, it was concluded that the use of cable thermal damage and flammability information based on the testing of unaged cable samples is an acceptable risk assessment practice. Indeed, in the case of flammability, this is a conservative practice.