This report summarizes results generated on a 5-year cable-aging program that constituted part of the Nuclear Energy Plant Optimization (NEPO) program, an effort cosponsored by the U. S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). The NEPO cable-aging effort concentrated on two important issues involving the development of better lifetime prediction methods as well as the development and testing of novel cable condition-monitoring (CM) techniques. To address improved life prediction methods, we first describe the use of time-temperature superposition principles, indicating how this approach improves the testing of the Arrhenius model by utilizing all of the experimentally generated data instead of a few selected and processed data points. Although reasonable superposition is often found, we show several cases where non-superposition is evident, a situation that violates the constant acceleration assumption normally used in accelerated aging studies. Long-term aging results over extended temperature ranges allow us to show that curvature in Arrhenius plots for elongation is a common occurrence. In all cases the curvature results in a lowering of the Arrhenius activation energy at lower temperatures implying that typical extrapolation of high temperature results over-estimates material lifetimes. The long-term results also allow us to test the significance of extrapolating through the crystalline melting point of semi-crystalline materials.
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