TRAIN CABIN FIRE SIMULATION AND PASSENGER EVACUATION ON FDS

Abstract

Train cabins are closed enough that if accidently fire takes place inside it, it brings great hazards and consequently leads to traveling passenger to get hurt or die. To prevent it, the prominent objective should be to develop a fire safety design which can make sure that passengers can safely escape from it in the case of accidental fire in it. Such model can be developed by numerical simulation of fire and evacuation processes of those conditions. This is done by utilizing Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS), provided by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), is basically Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software mainly for the fluid movement in the fire. In this present work, we have carried out simulation by FDS for the interior fire smoke spreading process, temperature distribution, visibility, effect of doors and windows open/close conditions, effects of air-condition running and evacuation plans when an accidental fire take place at the center and the door respectively inside a train compartment including effect of passenger load and heat release rate factors. As automobile seats are made of polyurethane, so a portion (0.5m × 0.5m) of seat has been used as fuel for combustion and evacuation time results have been reported for the above stated different fire conditions.