Numerical simulation of road tunnel fires involving heavy goods vehicle with solid fuels

Abstract

The road tunnel fire is an emerging topic in literature and many key areas are still undiscovered. Road tunnel fires can be catastrophic and can result in a significant loss of human life and property. In literature various experimental and numerical studies are available on road tunnel fires. Most of these studies involved heavy goods vehicle with a combination of wooden/plastic pallets to represent fuel arrangement. The fire scenario of heavy goods vehicle with solid wooden/plastic fuel is not well studied. The burning behavior of pallets and solid blocks are different and hence the tunnel conditions would be different under fire in both these cases. This will result in a significant difference in key parameters such as heat release rates and temperature profiles inside the tunnel. To study these effects, full-scale fire tests are ideal and recommended, however, due to extremely high cost, downtime, and legal obligations it’s not always practical to conduct a full-scale fire test especially for road tunnels involving a heavy goods vehicle. In lieu of full-scale tests, numerical analyses are often used to understand these phenomena. This study focuses on studying the road tunnel fires involving heavy goods vehicle with solid fuels using CFD modelling in FDS (fire dynamic simulator). A pyrolysis model will be used to generate the anticipated heat in the tunnel. The kinetic properties of materials will be used in order to correctly calculate the pyrolysis rates of fuel. The findings of the heat release rate and lining temperature from the simulation will be compared with available results of heavy goods vehicle fires which involved pallets as fuel.