Dripping Behavior of Wire Fire under Varying Pressure and Electric Current

Dripping of polymer insulations is a different type of hazardous behaviors in wire fire, which has a potential risk of igniting adjacent combustible material and causing the dramatic growth and spread of fire in buildings, aircraft, spacecraft and nuclear power plant. To improve the fire-safety strategy, bench scale tests are conducted to study the dripping phenomenon using thin wire sample under various atmosphere pressure and electric current. The results show that the variation of flame front has a slight fluctuation during molten dripping, while the flame size (especially flame height) changes significantly. Moreover, dripping frequency (f) decreases with pressure ( Ρ ) due to a sufficient burning effect, but it increases with electric current ( Ι ) because of a stronger accumulating effect.