Cable tray fires -: experiments and results of fire simulation codes

An "International Collaborative Project to Evaluate Fire Models for Nuclear Power Plant Applications" (ICFMP) has been started in 1999 to improve the reliability and the applicability of different fire models with respect to modeling fires for application to nuclear plants. Within the frame of this project several benchmark exercises have been conducted from different organizations to represent various fire scenarios. For one of these benchmark exercises, four full scale cable tray fire experiments have been performed. The goal of these experiments was to gain more insights on the consequences and effects of cable fires, in particular with respect to the functional failures of electric equipment, as well as for validation of state-of-the-art fire simulation codes. The test series considered pre-heating effects and includes time dependent electrical functional failure measurements. In this paper, an overview of the experimental as well as the calculated results of two different types of codes is given.