Numerical Investigation of Smoke Propagation in Road Tunnels Caused by a Burned Truck

Abstract

The efficiency of smoke extraction for longitudinal and transverse tunnel ventilation systems was studied in this paper by conducting numerical simulations using computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The smoke was assumed to result from a fire initiated from a truck inside the tunnel. The most dangerous issue regarding the fire inside tunnels is smoke as it leads to low visibility and choking and may lead to death. The most important result of this paper refers to that the longitudinal ventilation design does not provide efficient smoke extraction compared to the transverse ventilation design as the air jets push the smoke in the downstream direction and then the smoke spreads randomly after the flow loses its momentum gradually. There is a big drop in the visibility for the longitudinal ventilation design that appeared many times and at many locations downstream the fire location. On the other hand, the transverse ventilation design provided more efficient smoke extraction as the jet fan upstream the fire is turned off while the supply fan downstream the fire is reversed to work as an exhaust fan. As a conclusion based on the findings of this paper, it may be said that the transverse ventilation design provided more safe conditions, lower contaminants concentrations, and higher visibility values compared to the longitudinal ventilation design. This work tends to add more information to minimize the research gap related to having a detailed comparison between the two ventilation strategies for a special case where the fire size is relatively large in a long tunnel.