THERMAL SCIENCE

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Peter Vidmar

,

Stojan Petelin

METHODOLOGY OF USING CFD-BASED RISK ASSESSMENT IN ROAD TUNNELS

ABSTRACT
The definition of the deterministic approach in the safety analyses comes from the need to understand the conditions that come out during the fire accident in a road tunnel. The key factor of the tunnel operations during the fire is the ventilation, which during the initial fazes of the fire, impact strongly on the evacuation of people and latter on the access of the intervention units in the tunnel. The paper presents the use of the computational fluid dynamics model in the tunnel safety assessment process. The model is validated by comparing data with experimental and quantifying the differences. The set-up of the initial and boundary conditions and the requirement for grid density found during the validation tests is used to prepare three kind of fire scenarios 20 MW, 50 MW, and 100 MW, with different ventilation conditions; natural, semi transverse, full transverse, and longitudinal ventilation. The observed variables, soot density and temperature, are presented in minutes time steps trough the entire tunnel length. Comparing the obtained data in a table, allows the analyses of the ventilation conditions for different heat releases from fires. The second step is to add additional criteria of human behaviour inside the tunnel (evacuation) and human resistance to the elevated gas concentrations and temperature. What comes out is a fully deterministic risk matrix that is based on the calculated data where the risk is ranged on five levels, from the lowest to a very danger level. The deterministic risk matrix represents the alternative to a probabilistic safety assessment methodology, where the fire risk is represented in detail as well as the computational fluid dynamics model results are physically correct. .
KEYWORDS
fire, tunnel ventilation, benchmarking, risk analysis
PAPER SUBMITTED: 2006-04-12
PAPER REVISED: 2006-09-15
PAPER ACCEPTED: 2006-11-23
DOI REFERENCE: https://doi.org/10.2298/TSCI0702223V
CITATION EXPORT: view in browser or download as text file
THERMAL SCIENCE YEAR 2007, VOLUME 11, ISSUE Issue 2, PAGES [223 - 250]
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Methodology of using CFD-based risk assessment in road tunnels

© 2024 Society of Thermal Engineers of Serbia. Published by the Vinča Institute of Nuclear Sciences, National Institute of the Republic of Serbia, Belgrade, Serbia. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International licence