Common OECD/NEA FIRE and PRISME Cable Benchmark Exercise

Abstract

This paper deals with the common OECD/NEA FIRE and PRISME Cable Benchmark Exercise conducted for a realistic cable fire scenario in an electrical system of a nuclear power plant. The major goal was to simulate a real cable fire event in order to assess the behaviour of fire models for a complex and real fire scenario with the current state of knowledge. Since a numerical Benchmark Exercise on a real fire event is quite challenging, a three-step methodology was adopted: (1) a calibration phase of the cable fire models, (2) a blind simulation of a cable fire test, and (3) the real cable fire event simulation. The selected fire event from the FIRE Database occurred in 2014 in a heater bay of a nuclear power plant. Thirteen institutions from nine NEA member countries participated in this Benchmark Exercise. Simulations were performed using computational fluid dynamics codes, a lumped parameter code, and zone codes. The simulations have provided a wide range of results which reflect the difficulty for fire simulation codes to correctly predict the development of the fire heat release rate over time of a cable tray fire, even under simple, open atmosphere conditions.