The effect of different cable layouts on the fire behavior of electric cable arrays was experimentally studied. The influence of external heat flux on cable fire characteristics was investigated. Several parameters for electrical cables such as the post-burning morphology, ignition time, heat release rate, peak heat release rate and total heat release were obtained. The results show that cable layouts could affect cable charring degrees according to the post-burning morphology. A linear relationship was found in the transformed form of time to ignition and radiant heat flux, and the critical radiant heat flux value for the single cable array appeared smaller than that for the other two layouts. The peak heat release rate for Cables A–D with the single array presents the increasing trend with an increase in radiant heat flux, while the two parallel and intersectional cable arrays present the different trends. Moreover, the total heat release values of Cables A–D in the different cable layouts were analyzed. This work provides the basic data and preliminary investigation to fire engineering of cable arrays with the different layouts.
