The effect of PSD on life safety in subway station fire

Abstract

Fire is a major risk in the event of subway station fire due to the confining geometry of the underground space. As a part of an effort to improve the life safety in subway fire, the platform screen door (PSD) is more and more installed on the ground that PSD provides many benefits to passenger’s safety. This paper not only performs fire simulation and evacuation modeling but also estimates the effect of PSD on passenger’s life safety and an evacuation measure in the event of a subway station fire. The Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS V406) code is used to predict smoke spread and the time available for evacuation during the fire. The time required for evacuation is obtained from simple travel time relationship from Nelson and MacLennan. The passengers in platform with PSD have more available time of about 100s than in case without PSD. The subway turnstiles (ticket gate) dramatically increase the time required for evacuation due to jam and bring on danger passenger’s life safety. Therefore, the passage without barriers like turnstiles will be required not to obstruct evacuation for passengers in an emergency case of subway fire.