Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The proposed research deals with fire safety in subway cars and underground subway stations and tunnels and large spaces in buildings.  It continues the research program of the applicant in these areas and capitalizes on the knowledge and data gathered over the last few years from full-scale fire experiments performed by the applicant.  The proposed work focuses mostly on the improvement and use of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) models for modelling fires in subway cars, and underground subway stations to determine their impact on passengers and the structure.  Small-scale experiments using laboratory equipment, such as the cone calorimeter, will be conducted to determine the fire properties of materials used in subway cars, which will be used as inputs to the CFD models.  Comparisons will be made between the numerical predictions and experimental data already obtained by the applicant to determine whether the models can predict the fire characteristics during the different stages of fire development and the heat release rate of fires in traincars and subway stations, as well as smoke movement in the stations and tunnels and the effectiveness of the ventilation systems.  Occupant evacuation from the stations will also be considered using both simple egress calculations and evacuation models to determine the impact of fires on passengers and evaluate the effectiveness of the available egress routes and evacuation strategies.  The results of this research would be of importance for the design of ventilation systems in tunnels and subway stations and the tools developed can be used by fire departments to assist them in pre-planning their response to fires in these spaces. Another part of the proposed research deals with smoke management systems in large spaces, such as atria, found in buildings.  This work continues the research of the applicant in this area in which full-scale experiments were conducted to study the impact of make-up air velocity on the effectiveness of the smoke exhaust systems and to validate CFD models used to model fires in these spaces.  This work will use the validated CFD models to study in detail the parameters that influence the conditions in the atria and investigate the extend of applicability of the correlations developed by the applicant.  These correlations will be submitted to standard writing bodies to be considered for inclusion in the standards so they can be used by engineers for the design of the smoke management systems in atria.