Experimental investigation on the impact of cable fire products from flame-retardant cables on catalysts used in passive auto-catalytic recombiners

Abstract

Cable fires in nuclear power plants have a significant probability to occur at any time in the course of a severe accident or may as well be the initiating event of a severe accident sequence. During the combustion process, enormous amounts of aerosols alongside specific combustion gases (e.g. CO, CO2) can be released. Both nature and amount of the cable fire products depend on the combustion conditions. The effect of cable fire products distributing inside the containment and getting in contact with the catalyst surfaces of passive auto-catalytic recombiners (PARs) is of vital interest for safety analyses, in order to assess the hydrogen mitigation efficiency under these conditions.The newly built REKO-Fire facility at Forschungszentrum Jülich combines a flow tube reactor for catalyst investigation with a steady-state tube furnace for the constant generation of cable fire products at varying combustion conditions. That way, simultaneous exposure of 5 × 5 cm2 catalyst samples to cable fire products and hydrogen/air mixtures is possible, enabling to quantify the influence of gaseous and particulate components on the catalysts’ start-up behavior. The installation has been used in the present study to investigate the effect of cable fire products obtained from flame-retardant power cables under three different fire conditions on the start-up of two types of catalysts for hydrogen recombination.For well-ventilated cable fire, neither gaseous nor particulate (mainly soot) cable fire products seem to affect the onset of the catalytic H2 conversion for both Pt and Pd-based catalysts. In under-ventilated fire conditions, the Pt-based catalyst is significantly deactivated, while the only impairment for the Pd-based catalyst is observed at very low hydrogen concentrations. For cable fire products generated from oxidative pyrolysis, the overall picture is ambiguous. On the one side it is obvious that deactivation and start-up delay occur for both catalyst types. However, no clear conclusion can be taken from the experimental data concerning the effect of exposure time. The presence of carbon monoxide in the atmosphere as well as particulate depositions from cable pyrolysis seem to be the most relevant mechanisms for catalyst deactivation and deserve further investigation.