Fire Evacuation in a Large Railway Interchange Station

Abstract

Large railway interchange stations with complex geometry are common in contemporary integrated railway networks. Fire evacuation is commonly designed using the timeline analysis in comparing Available Safe Egress Time (ASET) and Required Safe Egress Time (RSET) with agreed scenarios. Smoke management systems are required to achieve longer ASET. Egress time analysis will be evaluated in this paper for a typical large railway interchange. The fire environment was simulated using fire dynamics simulator (FDS), a software based on computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Design fires of 2, 2.5, 5, 10, 25 and 50 MW were used in estimating ASET. Egress simulations by the software SIMULEX were conducted to predict the RSET under passenger loadings of 0.5, 1, 2 and 4 m2/person. The results show that the ASET in most of the cases with higher fire size and with higher passenger loading are less than the RSET. Consequently, the passengers are unsafe in the event of fire evacuation. Therefore, a larger safety margin, defined as the difference between ASET and RSET, should be provided. In the case of low safety margin in some existing stations, fire safety management and procedures on handling fire incidents have to be reformulated properly and carefully.