Performance of occupant evacuation in a super high-rise building up to 583 m

Abstract

The stairwell is the main evacuation channel of super high-rise buildings, so revealing the evacuation characteristics on stairs in such buildings based on a full-scale experiment is critical for safer evacuation. However, currently there are few studies focusing on the evacuation performance of crowd in such buildings, especially for the collective movement scenarios. Here, an evacuation experiment is carried out in Shanghai Tower with a vertical height of 583 m, which is the second tallest building in the world. The evacuation speeds for 69 participants in 58 stair sections are extracted and the effects of travel distance, gender, age and density on descent speeds are analyzed and discussed. According to the result that the group of participants with a 9.63% higher travel height spends a 16.39% longer evacuation time, yet within each group the speed does not decrease with the increase of the moving distance, we propose an interesting hypothesis that the travel distance may affect descent speed, but it needs to be further verified. The speeds of the female are significantly lower than those of the male and the female are more sensitive to the increase of travel distance. At the same time, younger participants show better evacuation ability than the older ones, including that they evacuate faster and are less affected by the confluence. Furthermore, a new method is proposed to calculate density and the fundamental diagram These results are useful for the validation and calibration of related evacuation models, and can provide basic data for the design of emergency evacuation facilities in super high-rise buildings.