Determination of critical parameters in the analysis of road tunnel fires

Abstract

The analysis of the fluid characteristics downstream of a fire source in transportation tunnels is one the most important factor in the emergency response, evacuation, and the rescue service studies. Some crucial parameters can affect the fluid characteristics downstream of the fire. This research develops a statistical analysis on the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) data of the road tunnel fire simulations in order to quantify the significance of tunnel dimensions, inlet air velocity, heat release rate, and the physical fire size (fire perimeter) on the fluid characteristics downstream of the fire source. The selected characteristics of the fluid (response variables) were the average temperature, the average density, the average viscosity, and the average velocity. The prediction of the designed statistical models was assessed; then the significant parameters’ effects and the parameters interactive effects on different response variables were determined individually. Next, the effect of computational domain length on the selection of the significant parameters downstream of the fire source was analyzed. In this statistical analysis, the linear models were found to provide the statistically good prediction. The effect of the fire perimeter and the parameters interactive effects on the selected response variables downstream of the fire, were found to be insignificant. Keywords: Road tunnel fire, Two-level fractional factorial design, Statistical two-level design, CFD, Fire dynamics