Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

A series of evacuation experiments were conducted on groups of 20 to 24 students including wheelchair users with an aid in walkways. Through these experiments, the effects of the number ratio of wheelchair users to total number of people, width of walkway, and width of opening on such evacuation aspects as the density, flow coefficient of doorways and walking velocity are quantified. Effective evacuation of crowds including the handicapped in public buildings is derived based on the experiments.