Fire safety is one of the top priorities in today’s building infrastructure safety. A fire once spread out of control, can quickly cause extensive damage to the property and ultimately to human lives. Ideally, all measures should be in place to ensure that a fire never occurs, but in the event that a fire has been ignited, every precaution should already be in place to ensure that it is contained quickly. Fire resistance may be built-in both structurally and by the correct choice and application of building materials. 

In particular, the resistance-to-fire (of a cable) is the term used to describe how long a cable continues to operate in a fire. This may be of primary concern, for instance, in life safety of fire fighting installations.

For cables, resistance-to-fire concerns:

• the ability of a cable to maintain functionality during fire;
• the duration of survival in working condition; 
• one specific cable family: Fire Resistant Cables.

These cables are manufactured with plain annealed solid or stranded copper strands. The conductors are protected with a fire barrier tape and are insulated with either a LSZH thermosetting compound or XLPE. The multicores are laid together and protected with an inner sheath of LSZH material, armoured with steel round wires for multicores or aluminium wires for single core and finally protected by an outer layer of LSZH material. Non-armoured cables are without the additional inner sheath and armouring. LSZH sheathing of all these cables are UV protected. This range of FR Cables are available with a voltage rating of 600/1000V and are manufactured to BS 7211 (Single Core Wiring), IEC 60502-1 (Non-Armoured) and BS 7846 (Armoured). The resistance-to-fire performance of cables is also indicated in terms of survival time: the times are 15, 30, 60, 90 and 120 minutes of operation in a standardized fire condition at European Level (CENELEC) and equivalent international (IEC).