Assessment of Emergency Evacuation in Tunnel Fire Environment

Abstract

Previous tunnel fire disasters have shown that serious damage could be caused. The first goal of tunnel fire safety is to guarantee the life safe of tunnel users. It is therefore important to pay much attention to the evacuation system of tunnels. The main purpose of this paper is to provide the approach and reasonable value of walk speed for evacuation assessment in tunnels with cross connections. Experiments were conducted in a tunnel with cross connections to measure the movement of tunnel users. Furthermore, taking the tunnel fire scenario as example, the whole evacuation process in the tunnel fire is assessed by the evacuation model, SGEM and Japanese evacuation empirical equation. The similar calculated evacuation time are obtained by the two approaches. The evacuation time is a crucial data for knowing the efficiency of the tunnel evacuation system, and useful information for supporting fire safety design of the tunnel.