Bus Fire Research Articles

A Simulation-Based Investigation on Thermal Responses of Suspension Bridge Tower Under Different Fire Scenarios

AbstractRecords of bridge fire incidents illustrate that bridge fires can have catastrophic consequences. The severity of these fires can be influenced by various factors such as bridge type, vehicle size, and wind. Contrary to building fires that have been extensively studied, scant attention has been paid to bridge fires and more specifically fire exposure to the suspension bridges. In addition, existing bridge fire literature is mostly concentrated on fire exposure to girders or cables of suspension bridges. Therefore, this study focused on the post-fire condition of a fire-exposed suspension bridge tower using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling techniques and finite element analysis (FEA). The impacts of the main bridge fire parameters including vehicle size, exposure duration, distance between the fire source and tower, and wind effects were also evaluated. Initially, fire dynamic simulator (FDS) was used to simulate 12 different fire scenarios. The time–temperature histories obtained from each scenario were transferred to the ABAQUS finite element (FE) software to conduct transient thermal analysis and obtain the temperature development within the steel tower of the bridge. The post-fire evaluation was performed with respect to the temperature-induced reduction in the yield strength of steel. The results show that fire exposure from a fuel truck in the proximity of a steel tower could significantly reduce the strength of the tower and lead to severe damage. Early control of the fuel truck fire is crucial in reducing the severity of the damage and preventing temperature development in higher areas of the tower. Although a wind toward the tower can significantly increase the fire-induced damage to the bottom parts of the tower, it considerably reduces the temperature exposure to the higher parts of the tower. Fire exposure from a normal vehicle does not put the tower at risk of failure, and an unprotected steel tower can withstand it. However, a bus fire may lead to minor damage. The thermal strengthening of the first 20 m of the tower can help in preventing the potential fire damage.

Fire Prevention in Buses Using Water Head and AWO System

Abstract: Buses can be designed to carry many passengers ,and in public places, incidents such as bus fires impose a relatively high threats to assets and lives. Hence, it is common to witness substainal casualties when a bus fire occurs .Fire diaster is common threat to lives and property . An IOT based automatic window opening system when smoke is detected by sensors is efficient one but ,this paper represents with a doubt if any one is struck on the bus ,this project helps to save their lives that keeping the steel pipes inside and outside of the bus and providing sprinkles and holes to the pipe In and Out side of the side of the bus in respectively. When some amount of fire/flame and smoke is detected by the sensors the water and foam mixture pass through the pipes and spreads over the bus.The rectangular water and foam storage tank is kept on the roof of the bus .The equipment here is the foam that can resists the fire so, Silicon Foam is the flame-retardant, self-extinguishing and can withstand 2100℃ flame .This project helps minimizing and delaying the spread of fire

Fire safety of interior materials of buses

AbstractThis study provides an analysis on the fire safety of passengers and the fire protection of coaches and buses. A brief review of major bus fire incidents, an overview of current regulations in Europe, and their limitations are presented. The study finds that the current small‐scale fire test methods described in UN ECE Reg No. 118 need to be replaced by test methods that can assess the reaction to fire of materials when exposed to ignition sources of varying sizes. To address these shortcomings, the study proposed an expert recommendation to update the material fire safety requirements and testing for buses. Additional measures are proposed, derived from objectives and strategies applied in other transport sectors, and can be tested through existing European and international standards, which are widely used by several industries. These measures aim to extend the time with tenable conditions for a safe evacuation in case of fire, reduce the degree of damage to buses, reduce the risk for fast and excessive thermal exposure on modern energy carriers needed for a more sustainable transport sector.

Analysis of Bus Fires Using Interpretative Structural Modeling

There has been a worldwide growing public concern regarding transit bus fires, mainly because of their association with severe loss of human life and property. As a result, numerous studies have been carried out to investigate the causes, factors, and features of such accidents, along with research focusing on the simulation of bus fire scenarios. However, a detailed analysis on the causes of bus fires and the inter-relationships of risk factors is lacking. This study identified 17 risk factors associated with bus fires through an analysis of accident records from China using the Delphi approach. An integrated interpretative structural modeling (ISM) was adopted to explore the interactions among risk factors associated with bus fires, providing a useful hierarchy of risk factors whose individual relationships are unambiguous but whose group relationships are too complex to organize intuitively. This can help practitioners better understand risk dependencies and prioritize risk mitigation efforts. Results show that a lack of safety education and safety knowledge popularization and inadequate laws and regulations are the two most important risk factors associated with bus fires. Drivers also play an important role in preventing accidents. The analysis can be extended to risk analysis in other types of accidents, i.e., railway accidents and coach accidents.

Reaction‐to‐fire testing of bus interior materials: Assessing burning behaviour and smoke gas toxicity

AbstractAlthough fire safety regulations for buses have been adapted in recent years regarding, for example, fire detection and engine fire suppression systems, the changes in regulations for bus interior materials are minimal. A comparison of fire safety regulations for interior materials in other transport sectors for trains, ships or aircraft reveals a much lower level of requirements for bus materials. Although repeated bus accidents as well as fire statistics show the danger a bus fire can pose to passengers. In particular, the combination of a fire incident and passengers with reduced mobility led to severe disasters in Germany and other European countries. To enhance the fire safety for passengers, the interior bus materials are crucial as the fire development in the bus cabin determines whether escape and rescue is possible. Against this background, bus interior materials were tested in different fire test scenarios. Measurement of a wide variety of parameters, for example, the mass loss, ignition time, smoke gas composition, heat release rate among others were carried out. Tested materials complied to the newest set of requirements. For this purpose, interior materials and their components had to be identified according to their chemical structure. Parts of the tests were funded by BASt (Federal Highway Research Institute) in the project 82.0723/2018. Experimental results show reaction‐to‐fire behaviour which lead to very limited times for escape and rescue in case of fire in a bus cabin. Based on the studies on fire behaviour and toxicity assessment, recommendations for improved fire safety regulations for interior materials could be made.

Research on factors affecting bus fire based on numerical simulation

With the rapid development of economy, the number of buses and bus fire increases. This paper takes bus as the research object and uses software FDS to explore the fire smoke spread under different fire power conditions. The results show that: with the increase in fire power, the smoke in the compartment rapidly accumulates, and the heating rate is also accelerated. The visibility decreases with the diffusion of smoke in the compartment. The CO concentration increases with time. The greater the fire power, the higher the temperature which will eventually stabilize. Only the concentration of smoke near the entrance will be slightly reduced. This is also conducive to the escape of people inside the car.

A Monte Carlo simulation study on probability distribution of urban tunnel fire

Urban tunnel traffic has its inherent charateristics, such as frequently periodical traffic congestion/blocking, tidal phenomenon, large traffic flow and population, complicated traffic confluences and cross-flowing intertwined sections. Unlike ordinary roads, the potential fire scenarios are quite different and the consequences of fire are extremely severe in urban tunnel. The study adopts theoretical calculation, formula derivation, traffic survey, random sampling simulation to explore the probability distribution of urban tunnel fire. MATLAB is used to realize the numerical simulation of a million fire scenarios under different working conditions. The results identify the major factors affecting two-lane tunnel vehicle ignition model and three-lane model respectively. The probability of six combustion scales (, , , , and ) is higher than that of others, and with the increase of combustion scale, the probability decreasing exponentially. The ratio of truck to bus has a significant impact on the probability of large-scale fire. And truck fire and bus fire have a risk of igniting vehicles in adjacent lanes. The research results provide a basis for the design parameters of evacuation safety in practical engineering.

Design of an Intelligent Broken Window System for Dealing with Bus Fire Accidents

In recent years, bus fires occur frequently and accidents are often accompanied by serious casualties. Aiming at this situation, in order to improve the shortage of the traditional way of escape for bus and reduce casualties, in this paper, an intelligent escape system for bus through broken Windows was designed. The system adopts modular design, and a large number of experiments and optimization are carried out in dangerous goods early warning, fire detection and broken window effect test. The results show that the system can effectively break windows and quickly open up multiple escape routes in the case of bus fire accident.

Research on case similarity matching of city bus fire incidents

Research on case similarity matching of city bus fire incidents

Influence of the water spray flow rate and angle on the critical velocity in tunnels with longitudinal ventilation

Recently, the water spray system has been used in important tunnels to weaken the heat release rate of fires and cool the fire smoke, which has a significant impact on the critical velocity that is the minimum longitudinal ventilation required to prevent the fire smoke from spreading upstream of a tunnel. Therefore, a series of tunnel fires with eight heat release rates responding to from a car fire to a bus fire set as 5 MW, 10 MW, 15 MW, 20 MW, 30 MW, 40 MW, 50 MW and 60 MW were simulated to investigate the influence of the water spray flow rate (0 L/min, 200 L/min, 300 L/min, 400 L/min, 500 L/min and 600 L/min) and spray angle (30°, 60°, 90°, 120° and 150°) on the critical velocity by Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS). The simulation data of the case without a water spray system were compared with previous studies and agreed well with previous model. However, previous model overestimates the critical velocity in the cases with a water spray system. The critical velocity decreases with the increase of water spray flow rate, while it increases firstly and then decreases with the increase of the spray angle. The change of the critical velocity is illustrated with the flow field and is caused by both the cooling effect of the water spray and inertial force of the longitudinal flow. Furthermore, a new correlation was proposed to predict the critical velocity in the tunnel with water spray system by introducing a modified coefficient β representing the water spray flow rate effect.

Determining the perceived safety and security attitude and knowledge of urban residents towards bus fires.

In recent years, the frequent occurrence of bus fire accidents has caused public concern in China, impacting the safe operation of urban transportation seriously. A cross-sectional survey was conducted to evaluate the safety & security (S&S) level of attitude and knowledge in relation to bus fires among residents in Fuzhou city, Fujian Province. 200 passengers from 6 bus terminals and 10 bus stations were selected as study subject. The results show that the S&S attitude and knowledge differ by gender, age, education background, occupation, and the frequency of taking a bus. The educational level significantly influences the S&S attitude and knowledge of the respondents, showing a positive correlation. Similarly, the passengers who take a bus frequently are more likely to display higher S&S attitude and knowledge scores. The participants working in governments and serving as managers in companies scored higher in attitude than the staff and students. A minority of respondents are concerned with bus fire S&S in their daily lives. Many passengers pay not much attention to the safety instructions when taking a bus. Some suggestions are given to improve S&S situation of bus transportation. The research results can lay the foundation for local governments, bus transport operators, and relevant safety organizations to establish a series of safety policies or regulations with respect to bus fires.

Analysis of smoke movement in the Hsuehshan tunnel fire

In 2012, a serious fire accident occurred in the Hsuehshan southbound road tunnel, which resulted in two fire fatalities and 34 injuries. A pickup truck was hit by a bus from behind; gasoline leaked from the bus and started the fire. Smoke was diverted from the southbound tunnel into the service tunnel and the northbound tunnel via two connection tunnels. Fire dynamics simulator (FDS) software was used to simulate the smoke movement in the 13 km long southbound road tunnel, employing more than 21 million computational cells. The heat release rate curve used in the simulation was based on a single bus fire which reached a maximum value of 30 MW. The smoke front movement obtained from the computer simulation was compared with that determined from the closed circuit TV (CCTV) recordings, and the agreement between the simulation results and CCTV recordings was sound. The critical velocity for controlling backlayering of a 30 MW bus fire was also determined from simulation, which agreed well with the value estimated from empirical correlations of model experiments. This research showed that during a fire, doors to connection tunnels should close automatically, and the service tunnel should only be used for emergency rescue purpose, instead of evacuation of people.

Genetic Identification of Victims in a Bus Fire by the Use of NoorGIS Software

Genetic Identification of Victims in a Bus Fire by the Use of NoorGIS Software

Modeling and analysis of a bus fire accident for evaluation of fire safety door using the fire dynamics simulator

The fire dynamics simulator (FDS) is a program based on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and is used extensively by fire research staff. Currently, it is used widely in various fields, including reconstruction simulations of fire scenes. Buses can be designed to carry many passengers, and in public places, incidents such as bus fires impose a relatively high threat to assets and lives. Hence, it is common to witness substantial casualties when a bus fire occurs. This paper investigates an incident that occurred on July 19, 2016 in Taiwan, where in a sightseeing tour bus caught fire on a highway, leading to the death of all 26 passengers on board. The investigation results show that the deaths were due to closed emergency exits and thick smoke and that the opening of emergency doors and the number of emergency exits significantly influence the success of evacuation. Furthermore, we analyze this case of vehicle fires installing an interior safety door, separating a bus into isolated categories or compartments helps in delaying the spread of fire. These results can provide some valuable information on risk evaluation and prevention of vehicle fires.

Simulation Analysis of the Pressure and Temperature in the Firing Bus

Fire accident in the running bus is very dangerous for the passengers. The temperature, pressure, and toxic fumes from the fire accident are the main factors of casualties of passenger in the closed bus. It is necessary to research the factors such as the temperature, pressure and smoke of the fire so as to improve the capability of rescuing the passengers and the passengers self-protecting under the emergency fire disaster. In this paper, the software named FDS is used to model and simulate the process of bus-firing, which a simulation describing the bus catching fire. The height of smog layer, distributions of indoor temperature and the carbon monoxide concentration from the firing bus are analyzed. By means of the simulation analysis of the bus fire procedure, the law of smog movement in the carriage is analyzed, and it is helpful for us to response to similar fire accidents.

Modeling and Simulation of Bus Fire Accidents

Fire accidents of buses, especially those ones often close the windows for equipped with air conditioner, have brought great threats on passengers’ lives and properties. It is important to make prepare for the fire emergency accidents. Because the fire accident of bus is very dangerous, and the virtual simulation is used to analyze the bus firing process instead of real tests so as to learn how to response to the emergency disaster in safety. The software named FDS is used to simulate the process of the bus-firing accident, which a running bus catch fire. Firstly, the whole simulation framework is built to guide the model process of the bus fire accident. Then, the height of smog layer, distributions of indoor temperature and carbon monoxide concentration from the bus firing accidents are analyzed by simulation way. The results of the simulation of the bus fire accidents show that the different distributions law of the fire factors in the fire accidents inside the carriage, and it is important to provide better reference to prepare for the fire emergency disaster.

Establishing school bus baseline emergency evacuation times for elementary school students

Emergency evacuation systems are critical to mass transportation vehicles such as school buses. Previous bus fire propagation tests indicate that the available time for successful evacuation is approximately 3–5min. Many school districts in the United States utilize school bus routes that exclusively transport children in kindergarten through second/third grade where the bus driver is the only adult onboard. Currently, no standards specify the maximum allowable evacuation time for school buses. Full-scale evacuation trials were performed to measure front door, rear door, and both door (simultaneous) evacuation flow rates for kindergarten through third grade students. The evacuation trials indicated that the grade level of school bus passengers, and available evacuation routes have a significant effect on flow rate (p<0.05). For evacuation trials with driver’s assistance mean flow rate through the front door was 29children/min, 21children/min for the rear emergency door, and 36children/min for evacuations using both doors simultaneously.

Retrospective data about the catheter-related complications and management in massive bus burn casualties.

This is a single-center, descriptive report of the management and complications of venous catheter use in 19 severely burned passengers from a bus fire that occurred on July 5, 2014, in Hangzhou. We recorded the parameters of the catheters insertion and indwelling. Sampling of each removed catheter was conducted to monitor for catheter-related infections. Bedside ultrasound screening was performed for recording central venous catheter (CVC)-related complications. Of the 174 venous accesses placed, 108 were CVCs. 27 (25.0%) catheter tip cultures (CTC) were positive; 12 (11.1%) were catheter-related blood stream infections (CRBSI). Acinetobacter baumannii was the most prominent bacterial infection for both CTC- (55.56%) and CRBSI- (75.00%) positive catheters. CTC- and CRBSI-positive rates were higher during the emergency stage, and both dropped rapidly after reform measures (chi-square test, p = 0.003), and all were negative after the no.8 catheters. Accumulative regression results indicated that total body surface area burned (TBSA), number of catheters, days of indwelling, and bloodstream infections were independently associated with CTC results, while gender and number of catheters were independently associated with CRBSI results. 1 femur vein thrombosis was detected and cured. Bedside ultrasound and professional IV team for CVC management are pivotal for massive burn victims. Their intervention helps control CVC-related infections and other complications. A. baumannii was the most frequent bacterial infection found in both CTC- and CRBSI-positive catheters. Several most important factors associated with catheter-related infections were concluded. This information alerts us to watch for patients with such warning factors.

Development of the science of mass casualty incident management: reflection on the medical response to the Wenchuan earthquake and Hangzhou bus fire.

In this paper, we review the previous classic research paradigms of a mass casualty incident (MCI) systematically and reflect the medical response to the Wenchuan earthquake and Hangzhou bus fire, in order to outline and develop an improved research paradigm for MCI management. We searched PubMed, EMBASE, China Wanfang, and China Biology Medicine (CBM) databases for relevant studies. The following key words and medical subject headings were used: 'mass casualty incident', 'MCI', 'research method', 'Wenchuan', 'earthquake', 'research paradigm', 'science of surge', 'surge', 'surge capacity', and 'vulnerability'. Searches were performed without year or language restriction. After searching the four literature databases using the above listed key words and medical subject headings, related articles containing research paradigms of MCI, 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, July 5 bus fire, and science of surge and vulnerability were independently included by two authors. The current progresses on MCI management include new golden hour, damage control philosophy, chain of survival, and three links theory. In addition, there are three evaluation methods (medical severity index (MSI), potential injury creating event (PICE) classification, and disaster severity scale (DSS)), which can dynamically assess the MCI situations and decisions for MCI responses and can be made based on the results of such evaluations. However, the three methods only offer a retrospective evaluation of MCI and thus fail to develop a real-time assessment of MCI responses. Therefore, they cannot be used as practical guidance for decision-making during MCI. Although the theory of surge science has made great improvements, we found that a very important factor has been ignored-vulnerability, based on reflecting on the MCI response to the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake and July 5 bus fire in Hangzhou. This new paradigm breaks through the limitation of traditional research paradigms and will contribute to the development of a methodology for disaster research.

A comparative study of test methods for assessment of fire safety performance of bus interior materials

SUMMARYThis work concerns the assessment of fire performance of interior materials in buses. The widely used test method ISO 3795/FMVSS 302 has received much criticism mainly based on the fact that the test is a small‐scale method not suited for bus fires induced by for example fire in the engine compartment or fire in a tyre. Furthermore, test specimens are oriented horizontally, whereas much fire spread in a real bus fire occurs on vertically oriented products. Seventeen products were investigated: 11 textiles, four solids and two insulations. Three test methods were compared: ISO 3795, ISO 6941 and ISO 5658‐2. Given the existing criteria for interior materials, it was found that ISO 6941 and ISO 5658‐2 place harder requirements on the materials.When the three methods were compared, it was found that ISO 3795/FMVSS 302 and ISO 6941 are insufficient for simulating bus fires typically occurring today. Such fires are often initiated by a fire in the engine compartment or in a tyre and can hardly be simulated by small‐scale methods as ISO 3795/FMVSS 302 or ISO 6941 even if the ISO 6941 method to some extent gives results similar to the established large‐scale ISO 5658‐2 method. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley &amp; Sons, Ltd.