Experimental study on knee and hand crawling evacuation for different age group students

Abstract

Evacuee motion posture plays an important role in evacuation in a building fire filled with smoke. In a real building fire accident, to prevent harm from the toxic smoke that is spreading along room ceilings, the crawling posture should be adopted by the evacuees. In this paper, we performed an experiment for elementary and middle school students to experience the evacuation process from a building in which a fire broke out and filled with smoke. The aim of this experiment is to investigate the knee and hand crawling (KHC) behavior. Interestingly, the KHC speed of elementary and middle school students is faster than that of college students studied in previous researches. A possible reason for this correlation could be the different experimental requirement for an urgent evacuation, and younger students’ familiarity of crawling motion. The average desired speed of KHC reduces by 54% compared with the upright walking (UW), which proves that the KHC behavior decreases the evacuation efficiency in a building fire. In the single-file experiment, the results show that middle school students have faster KHC speed in free regime than elementary school students. Additionally, middle school students (0.44 s) have smaller adaptation time than elementary school students (0.72 s), which means that middle school students have stronger reaction at small distance. Results of this study can provide the based parameters for human evacuation in a building fire filled with smoke and help to understand the characteristics of KHC behavior for elementary and middle school students.