Investigation and simulation of non-adaptive psychology of crowd evacuation under toxic gas leakage accident in chemical park

Abstract

Chemical parks promote economic development, but accidents have caused casualties. Non-adaptive crowd psychology during evacuations can lead to panic, which can result in irrational behavior. Exploring ways to control panic and improve evacuation efficiency is crucial. In this paper, we conduct a questionnaire survey to grasp the psychological rules of evacuating people in the context of toxic gas leakage accidents in chemical parks, and define the weight of panic influence factor accordingly. Combined with a specific chemical park scenario, ALOHA software was used to simulate and analyze the consequences of toxic gas (liquid ammonia as an example) leakage, and the evacuation available time was obtained as 720s. The simulation experiments of personnel evacuation in the accident context were conducted by using Anylogic software based on the social force model, and the required evacuation time was 663.9s, 706.3s, 725.4s and 744.5s respectively under different panic influence factors. Drawing on the idea of building fire performance assessment, the safety criteria for evacuation under toxic gas leakage considering evacuation panic is proposed, namely RSET < ASET, to determine the safety status of personnel evacuation under different panic impact factors, which is hoped to provide some effective guidance for emergency evacuation in chemical parks.