A Study on the Evacuation of an Extra-Long Highway Tunnel Fire—A Case Study of Chengkai Tunnel

Abstract

The smoke from tunnel fires spreads over long distances and is difficult to vent. Smoke accumulation leads to high temperatures, low visibility, and high concentrations of toxic gases, which greatly hinders the evacuation of people inside the tunnel. In this paper, a representative extra-long highway tunnel—Chengkai Tunnel—is selected as the engineering background, and a tunnel model is built using FDS and Pathfinder software to simulate the fire scenario and evacuation scenario under different longitudinal wind speeds. The concept of safe evacuation reliability is proposed to describe the relationship between the ASET (available safe egress time) and the RSET (required safe egress time). The simulation results show that with the increase in longitudinal wind speed, the ASET upstream of fire source increases first and then remains unchanged, while ASET downstream of fire source increases first and then decreases. The ASET upstream of the fire source is affected by visibility, while the ASET downstream of the fire source is affected by visibility when the wind speed is low, and is affected by temperature as the wind speed increases. The bottleneck effect is an important reason for the long evacuation time of people. The blockage time is a power function of the evacuation movement time, and increasing the width of the cross passage can improve the evacuation efficiency of the tunnel. The increase in the number of evacuees will reduce the reliability of the safe evacuation of personnel. Among all simulated scenarios, a longitudinal wind speed of 2.5 m/s has the highest safe evacuation reliability, with 0.79, 0.92, and 0.99 for scenarios R1, R2, and R3, respectively. Excessive wind speed reduces the safe evacuation reliability downstream of the fire source.