Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

One of the most commonly used plastics in electrical cables is flexible PVC, which includes 30-40 wt. % combustible plasticizers. In this work, the effects of the modelling decisions and parameter estimation methods on the pyrolysis modelling of two PVC cables were studied. The kinetic and thermal parameters were estimated from the TGA and cone calorimeter experiments. The role of the plasticizers was shown to be important for the early HRR. The effects of the reaction path and reaction order were only minor in the TGA results but significant effects were found in the cone calorimeter results, unless a specific set of thermal parameters was estimated. The results show that the thermal parameters estimated for one kinetic model should not be used for another, unless the difference between the kinetic models considers only fuel yields or different pairs of kinetic coefficients with same reaction order.