The Analysis of Human Behaviour and Evacuation in a Fire Situation in a Building for Higher Education

The paper presents the analysis of a human evacuation from a higher education building located in Iassy,Romania,by means of engineering techniques to approach fire safety.Because in Romania(as in other European countries)fire safety design of buildings is prescriptive and not performance-based,a fire safety engineering approach arouse great interest in many countries such as the U.S.A.,Australia,New Zealand,England,Sweden,Finland,etc.This paper is based on the assumption of starting a fire in the space of a hall for festivities,located on the ground floor of the building,near two human evacuation routes;We consider two building evacuation scenarios:two exits and,respectively,just one exit(assuming that the second would be accidentally blocked).

Improvement and upgrade of mine fire simulation program MFIRE

MFIRE, an underground mine fire simulation program developed in 1980＇s, is a tool that can be used to simulate the impacts of a mine fire event to a mine ventilation network. However, the lack of the abilities to simulate some of the important mine fire phenomena realistically hindered its wide applications. This research carried out to improve and upgrade the MFIRE 2.20 program to MFIRE 2.30. The new additions of MFIRE 2.30 including a time dependent fire model, smoke rollback prediction, the incorporation of a moving fire source, and a rewriting of MFIRE in Microsoft Visual C＋＋ were interpreted.

Coal mine fire and human escape simulation

Coal mine fire and human escape simulation system is developed based on 3D Max and EON software for the purpose of coal mine safety training.The models,such as miners,roadways,typical equipments,fire and smoke are all constructed in 3D Max.The roadway models derived from real data,functions of each part are determined for the roadway based on the data,and then corresponding tunnel typical equipments are added.Emergency refuge system model is not only an important system model,but also an important destination for fire simulation and human escape.The roaming of the miners through the roadways,the interactive functions between users and computer,the fire process of beginning,spreading,and destroying,the human escape interaction are simulated in EON virtual reality software after these models have been input into it.Besides,collision detection based on hierarchical bounding volumes is also utilized.Simulation results suggest that this strategy can produce realistic virtual state and fire effect.While as part of the coal mine safety simulation and training System(CMSSTS),this work is far from what we expected,and there is more intensive work that should be done.

A Method for the Application of Numerical Simulations during Firefighting Operations Using Pre-Simulated, Model-Based Fire Scenarios

The spread of fire and smoke during a fire incident plays a crucial role in rescuing people from the burning building. So it is important for the decision makers (the head of rescue staff) to get a prediction about the spread of fire inside the building through computational techniques like numerical fire simulations. But these techniques require advanced mathematical knowledge and are very time consuming. This paper presents a new method which employs a set of pre-simulated and model-based scenarios to find the closest one to the real fire and present its results to the decision makers. For this purpose, we shift the performance consuming numerical fire simulations into a former phase by integration of these simulations into the planning process of the building. This is realized by enhancing the methods of Building Information Modeling (BIM). To provide the fire simulation results during a real case, our new concept includes a scenario database where all simulated fire scenarios will be collected. In a real case, a special search algorithm will go through this database to find the closest pre-simulated fire scenario to the real fire on the basis of reported information from the burning building.

An experimental study on fire characteristics of urban complex underground space based on BIM

Compared with the space on the ground,if there is a fire in the urban complex underground space,the loss will be greatly harmful.In addition,the complex underground space is usually connected with other large space areas and densely populated.Once a fire occurs in the complex underground space,it will cause huge property losses and casualties.In order to reduce the risk of fire,it is necessary to deeply understand the development rules and characteristics of fire in the complex underground space of the city.This article has mainly carried on the following work:(I)A particularly complex model of the multi‐storey subway station was built.On this basis,three groups of comparative experiments were conducted to study the effects of fire power,fire location and smoke control system on fire development,and the conclusion that fire location is the most important factor for fire development was obtained;(II)In order to explore the entire space fire and the local space fire,CFD(Computational Fluid Dynamics)is used to build a large‐size fire model and a small‐size fire model respectively;(III)Multiple detector data as temperature slices were built,and it is expected to make full use of the simulation data to deduce the important index of fire location in the early stage of fire.All of the works in this paper will provide reference experimental data for the prevention and firefighting of a sudden fire in the complex underground space.

Simulation of Emergency Evacuation in Virtual Reality

A virtual reality system was developed to simulate emergency evacuations during fires. The spreading of the flame and smoke in the virtual fire was modeled based on numerical fire simulations, so that the conditions are similar to real life. A multi-grid, multi-base-state database model was used to overcome the disadvantages of traditional smoke spreading simulations. Textured images and particle systems provide visualization of the flame and smoke. The system immerses the user in a virtual environment with detailed interactions between the users and the virtual environment. The system can show which evacuation methods are effective for building safety evaluations.

Application of Computer Integration Technology for Fire Safety Analysis

With the development of information technology, the fire safety assessment of whole structure or region based on the computer simulation has become a hot topic. However, traditionally, the concerned studies are performed separately for different objectives and difficult to perform an overall evaluation. A new multi-dimensional integration model and methodology for fire safety assessment were presented and two newly developed integrated systems were introduced to demonstrate the function of integration simulation technology in this paper. The first one is the analysis on the fire-resistant behaviors of whole structure under real fire loads. The second one is the study on fire evaluation and emergency rescue of campus based on geography information technology (GIS). Some practical examples are presented to illuminate the advantages of computer integration technology on fire safety assessment and emphasize some problems in the simulation. The results show that the multi-dimensional integration model offers a new way and platform for the integrating fire safety assessment of whole structure or region, and the integrated software developed is the useful engineering tools for cost-saving and safe design.

Field Test of Optical and Electrical Fire Detectors in Simulated Fire Scenes in a Cable Tunnel

This paper presents the testing results of three types of fire detectors： electrical heat sensing cable, optical fiber Raman temperature sensing detector, and optical fiber Bragg grating （FBG） temperature sensing detector, in two simulated fire scenes in a cable tunnel. In the small-scale fire with limited thermal radiation and no flame, the fire alarm only comes from the heat sensors which directly contact with the heat source. In the large-scale fire with about 5 ℃/min temperature rising speed within a 3-m span, the fire alarm response time of the fiber Raman sensor and FBG sensors was about 30 seconds. The test results can be further used for formulating regulation for early fire detection in cable tunnels.