THE USE OF CAFE-3D FOR THE SIMULATION OF TUNNEL FIRES

Fires after accidents inside tunnels, such as the July 2001 Howard Street Tunnel fire in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, have raised stakeholder questions concerning the survivability of a spent nuclear fuel (SNF) transport cask when exposed to similar thermal environments. The analysis of tunnel fires is a computational challenge because of the need for very large computational domains in order to fully simulate such a problem. In this paper, the analyses of two different tunnel fire scenarios are described and the performance of typical SNF casks when exposed to these tunnel fire environments is discussed. The CAFE-3D fire code is used to model a series of fires inside tunnels, and the thermal performance of a SNF transportation cask within such fire environments is estimated with the use of the MSC PATRAN-P/Thermal finite element analysis code. The methodology used to simulate this type of fire scenario as well as a description of the manner in which the CAFE code couples the computational fluid dynamics and the finite element analysis techniques are also presented.