TY - JOUR A1 - Gallo, Emanuela A1 - Stöcklein, Waldemar A1 - Klack, Patrick A1 - Schartel, Bernhard T1 - Assessing the reaction to fire of cables by a new bench-scale method JF - Fire and Materials N2 - The recently approved EU Construction Products Regulation (CPR) applies to cables as construction products. The difficulty of predicting the fire performance of cables with respect to propagation of flame and contribution to fire hazards is well known. The new standard EN 50399 describes a full-scale test method for the classification of vertically mounted bunched cables according to CPR. Consideration of the material, time, and thus cost requires an alternative bench-scale fire test, which finds strong demand for Screening and development purposes. The development of such a bench-scale fire test to assess the fire Performance of multiple vertically mounted cables is described. A practical module for the cone calorimeter is proposed, simulating the fire scenario of the EN 50399 on the bench scale. The efficacy of this module in predicting full-scale CPR test results is shown for a set of 20 different optical cables. Key properties such as peak heat release rate (PHRR), fire growth rate (FIGRA), and flame spread are linked to each other by factors of around 5. In a case study, the bench-scale test designed was used to investigate the influence of the main components on the fire behaviour of a complex optical cable. KW - Optical cables KW - Construction products regulation KW - Bench-scale fire testing KW - Reaction to fire KW - Cone calorimeter PY - 2017 DO - https://doi.org/10.1002/fam.2417 SN - 0308-0501 SN - 1099-1018 VL - 41 IS - 6 SP - 768 EP - 778 PB - Wiley AN - OPUS4-42092 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -