Fire (Jun 2023)

Experimental Study on Fire Suppression of the Outdoor Oil-Immersed Transformer by High-Pressure Water Mist System

  • Huaitao Song,
  • Haowei Yao,
  • Xiaoge Wei,
  • Hengjie Qin,
  • Youxin Li,
  • Kefeng Lv,
  • Qianlong Chen

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/fire6060238
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 6, no. 6
p. 238

Abstract

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Fire accidents due to oil-immersed transformers seriously threaten the safe operation of power systems. In this paper, the similarity principle was used to design a high-pressure water mist fire-extinguishing test platform for a small-scale transformer fire, and the design method achieved a good fire extinguishing effect. The results indicate that a deflagration phenomenon, lasting about 2–4 s, could be observed after activating the high-pressure water mist system; the flame temperature rose rapidly at first, then dropped sharply, and finally cooled to the indoor temperature. The nozzle’s flow rate in this system has a significant impact on the fire extinguishing time. Meanwhile, the adjustment of the upper nozzle height also influenced the fire suppression effectiveness of the system, where a height of 1800 mm achieved the best performance compared to the others. In addition, the ambient wind speed is a very unfavorable factor for transformer fire suppression, where the fire extinguishing efficiency decreases rapidly with the increase in wind speed. Therefore, under low wind speed conditions, the high-pressure water mist system has great advantages in the fire suppression of outdoor oil-immersed transformers, and the above research results can provide a reference for the optimization design of this system.

Keywords