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STUDY OF MULTI-FLOOR BUILDING EVACUATION BY MEANS OF NUMERICAL SIMULATION

Marius Cornel Șuvar

Abstract

The evacuation time of occupants in a fire event is a particularly important parameter, both for the development of emergency evacuation plans and in the post-event investigation. To estimate this time, the classic approach uses alarm / evacuation trials. These simulations involve the allocation of human and financial resources and have the disadvantage of not being able to cover a wide range of technically possible critical scenarios. Moreover, it has been shown that in real fire cases, human behaviour can be significantly different from that shown during exercises due to a complex of psychological and social factors, dependent on the individual behavioural response to the direct action of the fire or its effects. The modern scientific approach recommends using the robust, validated, computerized models for People Movement (PM) in these situations, which will lead to an estimation as close as possible to the reality of evacuation times. Such a model is the Pathfinder software, which offers the possibility to evaluate an unlimited number of scenarios, based on the particularities of the analysed building, different responses of the occupants to the risk factor, the interactions between the individuals in the rescue process and the possibility of coupling the results of computerized fire simulations with the evolution of the evacuation process. In the case of multi-storey buildings, the architectural and structural complexity of the building implies an influence difficult to quantify on evacuation times. The paper examines the possibilities of using computerized evacuation models, especially Pathfinder, as part of the engineering approach to fire safety. Simulated scenarios start from the hypothesis of a fire produced in a room of a multi-storey building and aim to estimate the egress time, using different combinations between the number of available exits, the presence of elevators and behavioural characteristics (e.g. physical abilities of the occupants, occupant familiarity with the environment, etc.).

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/sgem2018/2.1/s07.092

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