| The Container Analysis Fire Environment (CAFE) computer code has been developed at Sandia National Laboratories to predict the response of spent nuclear fuel transport casks under severe accident conditions. It links a finite element (FE) model of a cask to a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) fire simulator. The fire simulator calculates the fire behavior and heat transfer to an engulfed or nearby cask. The FE model calculates the response of the cask to the heat transfer. The fire simulator employs a number of physics-based models to calculate fuel evaporation, turbulent mixing, reaction chemistry and heat release, and radiation heat transfer within highly sooty fires. Parameters used in these models must be determined from measurements performed in large-scale fire tests.;Three large-scale fire tests were recently performed at an outdoor facility at Sandia. A 2.43-m-diameter, 4.57-m-long, 2.54-cm-wall-thickness pipe calorimeter was suspended one-meter above a 2000-gallon pool of JP8 jet fuel. The fire pipe temperature, fuel recession rate, and wind conditions were measured at several locations during the fires. In the current work, CAFE simulations are performed for different model parameters and compared to the experimental data. These results show the sensitivity of the CAFE-predicted pipe temperatures to those parameters, and the parameter values that bring the CAFE results close to the measured data for all three tests. |
