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ABSTRACT
The evacuation of pedestrians from a road tunnel in
the event of a fire is linked to the tenability of the
environment the pedestrians are walking through,
with the following factors generally assessed:
Visibility
Local air temperature
Radiant heat flux from the fire and hot smoke
layer
Carbon monoxide concentration
PURPOSE
The purpose of this paper is to explore the factors
that can be considered when employing pedestrian
modeling techniques to analyze the evacuation time
and tenability conditions during a fire incident using
typical section of a bidirectional road tunnel as an
example.
METHODOLOGY
The first stage of the analysis was to undertake CFD
modeling in FDS, providing predictions of the
extinction coefficient, temperature, radiant heat flux
and carbon monoxide concentrations on a slice plane
located 2.5 meters above the road level, as per the
National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) 502
standard.
MODELED SCENARIO
The general layout of the tunnel is shown in Figure
10 at the end of this paper.
The model represents a 416 meter long bidirectional
road tunnel that is 9.5 meters wide from wall to wall
and 5.5 meters tall from top of road surface to
ceiling. The ends of the tunnel are open to the air and
are treated as the exit points for the egressing
pedestrians. The roadway has a slope of 5.6% for the
first 95 meters on the left hand side, with the left
hand exit being the highest point. The remainder of
the tunnel is level.
Vehicle
Occupancy
Number
of
vehicles
to left of
fire
Number
of
vehicles
to right
of fire
Proportion
of total
vehicles
22%
8%
19%
19%
5
15
1
1
1
2
5%
8%
53
19%
The second method was to add a variable premovement time, based on three different probability
density functions dependent on the proximity to the
fire.
A probability density function describes the
likelihood for a random variable at a given time, in
this case the likelihood of people to start moving. The
area under the graph represents the fraction of people
who have started moving up to that time, and
therefore must have a total area of 1.
SIMULATION SCENARIOS
A total of four simulation scenarios were set up,
taking into account the two fan sizes and the differing
application of pre-movement time and walking
speeds, as listed in Table 2 below.
Table 2: List of simulations.
Total
PreScenario
fan
movement
capacity
time
Walking
speed
Case 1
Fixed
120 m /s
5 minutes
1 m/s
0.5 m/s
PRM
Case 1
Distribution
120 m3/s
Distribution
Distribution
Case 2
Fixed
180 m3/s
5 minutes
1 m/s
0.5 m/s
PRM
Case 2
Distribution
180 m3/s
Distribution
Distribution
ASSESSMENT OF TENABILITY
The assessment of the tenability conditions within the
tunnel environment to allow people to evacuate
safely considered the following aspects:
RESULTS
The ISO standard further discusses the consideration
of threshold criteria and their dependence on the
desired design output, providing the following values
to help designers chose appropriate levels.
Temperature
In order to assess the tenability of temperature in the
tunnel, temperature plots were taken directly from
FDS at a height on 2.5 meters from the roadway at
one-minute intervals for each fan size case. The
resulting plots are shown in Figure 11 and Figure 12
at the end of this paper.
4:
Static spreadsheet
calculation.
Pedestrian type
evacuation
time
Pre-movement
time
Time to
descend from
bus
Time to walk
5:00
5:00
5:00
5:00
2:00
2:00
2:00
2:00
1:49
3:38
4:15
8:30
Total Time
8:49
10:38
11:15
15:30
Visibility
The total evacuation time, which indicates the impact
of the extinction coefficient on the occupants of the
tunnel, are listed in Table 9 below, as averaged across
the 5 separate runs undertaken for each scenario,
along with a comparison to the time derived from the
static calculation where a PRM is the last person to
exit the tunnel.
Heat flux
The results from the FDS files indicated that, aside
from the immediate vicinity of the fire, at no time
does the heat flux exceed the 2.5kW/m value cited in
the NFPA 502 standard.
likely worst-case starting position in each of the 20meter sections along the tunnel.
Case 1 Fixed
Case 1
Distribution
Case 2 Fixed
Case 2
Distribution
13:20
16:10
7:51
10:43
12:56
9:30
13:13
16:00
Case 1 Fixed
Case 1
Distribution
Case 2 Fixed
Case 2
Distribution
14:52
18:57
8:40
10:24
16:24
12:00
12:57
18:47
CONCLUSIONS
The study indicates that a number of factors need to
be assessed when considering tenability conditions
for people evacuating a tunnel in the event of a fire.
Of the 4 factors considered for this tunnel
configuration, temperature rise affected the tenability
of the tunnel environment the quickest. The left-hand
side of the tunnel experiences the highest
temperatures, with the section of the tunnel 50 meters
either side of the fire becoming untenable from 4 to 6
minutes of the start of the simulation.
REFERENCES
10
TUNNEL LAYOUT
Figure 10: Tunnel layout and vehicle location with occupancy shown.
FDS TEMPERATURE PLOTS
Figure 11: Temperature plots at a height of 2.5m above road level for Case 1, fan size 3 x 40 m3/s from time = 1 to
20 minutes.
11
Figure 12: Temperature plots at a height of 2.5m above road level for Case 2, fan size 3 x 60 m3/s from time = 1 to
20 minutes.
12
Figure 13: STEPS plots showing people and extinction coefficient during evacuation of Case 1 Fixed. The images
are taken from the second run of the simulation.
13
Figure 14: STEPS plots showing people and extinction coefficient during evacuation of Case 2 Fixed. The images
are taken from the third run of the simulation.
14
Figure 15: STEPS plots showing people and extinction coefficient during evacuation of Case 1 Distribution. The
images are taken from the second run of the simulation.
15
Figure 16: STEPS plots showing people and extinction coefficient during evacuation of Case 2 Distribution. The
images are taken from the second run of the simulation.
16
Figure 17: FDS plots of temperature on a vertical plane along the tunnel with Case 1 fans.
17
Figure 18: FDS plots of temperature on a vertical plane along the tunnel with Case 2 fans.
18
Table 13: Images of the evacuation taken from STEPS with 10 meter visibility iso-surface and extinction coefficient
slice plane data looking towards the fire from the right-hand side.
Table 14: Images of the evacuation taken from STEPS with 10 meter visibility iso-surface and extinction coefficient
slice plane data looking towards the fire from the left-hand side.