Capacity of doors during evacuation conditions

Abstract

In this paper, we show how the capacity of evacuation doors is affected by the evacuation door width, population composition, the presence of an open door and evacuation conditions. For this, laboratory experiments have been performed. Varying door opening widths showed that only the experiment with the widest door opening (275 cm) resulted in a capacity lower than the threshold capacity from the design guidelines (2.25 P/m/s). The average observed capacities are for all widths lowest for the lowest stress level and highest for the highest stress level. The population with a greater part of children has the highest capacity, while the lowest capacity is, as expected, found for the experiment with 5% disabled participants. The presence of a door opened in the escape direction in an angle of 90 degrees for a door opening of 85 cm results in a 20% capacity reduction.