Abstract
Traffic accidents involving vehicles transporting hazardous materials (HazMat) can cause serious fire hazards, threatening the safety of bridge infrastructure as well as nearby traffic. For critical bridges such as long-span cable-stayed and suspension bridges, fire hazards can not only cause severe structural damage, but also serious traffic disruption, congestion, and accidents. Unlike short-span bridges, long-span cable-supported bridges often experience considerable wind effects at the height of the bridge deck which can significantly influence fire hazards. As the critical components of cable-supported bridges, the failure of cables or hangers due to fire may trigger progressive failure of the bridge structure. Existing studies on fire simulation of long-span bridges, however, are very limited. Typical fire hazard scenarios from vehicles transporting hazardous material (HazMat) are simulated with fire dynamics simulation (FDS) software on a suspension bridge with a focus on the threats to hangers. To more realistically consider the potential fire hazards to bridge hangers of long-span bridges, appropriate fuel size, transverse offset distance, and wind effects are considered. The study of a baseline scenario is carried out first and followed by parametric studies to investigate the effects of wind speeds, longitudinal offsets, hazardous material types and spill sizes on the fire simulation results.
Highlights
1 Introduction On average, 100–300 vehicle crashes result in bridge fires in the United States every year according to Wright et al (2013)
For some critical bridges, including long-span cable-stayed and suspension bridges, structural damage or failure does mean the huge amount of direct repair cost of the structures, and, sometimes more significant monetary costs associated with traffic disruption and rerouting
These results suggest that the relative location of the hazardous materials (HazMat) trucks caught in fire to a specific hanger is critical in terms of quantifying the temperature gradient information for that particular hanger
Summary
100–300 vehicle crashes result in bridge fires in the United States every year according to Wright et al (2013). In order to study fire hazards caused by vehicles transporting hazardous material on long-span bridges, one key step is to realistically simulate the fire scenario, providing some key data such as time-dependent temperatures of exposed structural elements. Typical fire hazard scenarios from HazMat vehicles are simulated with FDS on a suspension bridge with a focus on the threats to hangers. The wind effect on fire on long-span bridges is very critical and unique as compared to bridges with shorter spans The obtained internal temperature may not represent the actual temperature of real hangers, it can still provide some preliminary yet important observations which can help future studies (Sloane 2017)
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