Simulation and Assessment of Fire Evacuation Modes for Long Underwater Vehicle Tunnels

Abstract

The objective of this study is to propose a new method to evaluate the performance of different evacuation modes, and to find a rational evacuation mode for long underwater vehicle tunnels. In this study, a combined evacuation model (TPES) incorporating both a traffic flow module and a crowd evacuation module is proposed to simulate the integrated crowd evacuation with the effects of traffic flow, and the model is partially validated by a field evacuation test and a verified model Simulex. A vehicle tunnel was modeled to simulate fire-related traffic congestion and passenger evacuation, and then the evacuation performance index I m of three evacuation modes in different fire situations were calculated. The results revealed that the hybrid evacuation mode performs best among the three modes, with I m superior to other two modes by up to 26%. The transversal evacuation passage mode performs better than the longitudinal mode under the same conditions. However, the transversal and longitudinal modes can be equivalent when the passage spacing difference is within a range of 150–200 m. The critical spacing of the evacuation passage in a simple evacuation process lies in between 100 m and 350 m at confidence level of 90% for the transversal evacuation mode.