NUMERICAL INVESTIGATION OF BURNING BEHAVIOR OF POWER CABLES

Abstract

Numerical simulation is used to increase the knowledge base for the failure of instrumentation or control cables utilized in the power industry. With the development of new technologies, the energy demand is continuously increasing and so for the transmission of these energies power cables are required. Nowadays, there are many incidents in industrial as well as residential areas where cables become one of the major concerns because of their combustible nature and it becomes a source of fire itself. The help of numerical modeling of fires in cables can help in the development of procedures, and norms, which we can implement, to protect the personnel to prevent material and economic losses. The model used for the simulation includes the electrical core of the conductors, the enveloping insulation, the filler material, steel armour, and the jacket. A constant current is supplied to the cable for study one but during the second study, a continuous current is supplied simultaneously with an average heat flux applied to the cable for one-fourth part of the cable until a short circuit in the cable i.e. failure of the cable after average heat flux applied than the third study started with same conditions only change is that there is an internal fire in the cable due to short circuit, and after complete burning of the cable cooling phase of the cable has been started i.e. the fourth study. The temperature distribution of the different layers of the cable, and incident heat flux will be measured for the ten different simulations with necessary changes according to experiments and to validate these numerical data compared them with experimentation, the correlation was found to be a conservative estimate of the time of failure.