Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

Safety evaluation and assessment becomes an important topic in the design and operation of tunnels and other underground corridors nowadays. The computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model is an indispensable tool in this process, which can predict the possible fire scenarios by calculating the temperature, concentration, velocity and heat transfer in the concerned domain. In this paper, a validation study for a newly developed CFD code SIMTEC was presented, and the modeling results were compared with experimental data which were obtained through a batch of fire tests in a reduced-scale corridor. The simulations agree reasonably well with measured results. In general, the CFD model predicts the hot layer temperature and CO2 concentration with good accuracy, especially at the position closer to the end of the corridor. The CO concentration close to the fire source is also well captured in the simulation. However, the CO concentration prediction at downstream far away from fire source is poor. In this study, the effect of corridor fire intensity was also investigated, by varying the fire source size while with other parameters fixed. Both the measurements and the simulation indicate that the average hot layer temperature near the fire source did not change obviously despite of the increase in fire source size.