Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

The time to damage, i.e., time to short circuit, and the corresponding temperature within the cable were recorded for two different data cables and one low voltage cable when subjecting the cables to an elevated surrounding temperature. In the experiments it was found that short-circuiting occurred at a certain temperature in the core of the studied cables. The heating of the cables was modeled with the aid of computer programs for thermal analysis and an analytical solution of heat conduction. The experimental results were used to evaluate the different models. Both the analytical solution and the use of the thermal analysis programs turned out to be promising. However, both the analytical solution and the use of computer programs such as TASEF require data of the thermal properties of the cables. This is a complication as such data are not easily accessible. To some extent the thermal properties of the cables could be estimated from the experimental results.