Available online at www.sciencedirect.

com

Procedia Engineering 52 (2013) 158 – 164

Research the Occupants Safe Egress of Underground Pedestrian Street

Based on the Analysis of Fire Smoke Movement
HUANG Li-lia,b , ZHU Guo-qinga,b, ZHANG Guo-weia,b, YIN Feia,b,*
a
Faculty of safety engineering, China University of Mining and Technology, Xuzhou,(221116),China
b
Fire research institute, China University of Mining and Technology, Xuzhou,(221116),China

Abstract

As the research the occupants safe egress problem of underground pedestrian street, according to the ideas of performance-based design,
propose the egress methods of the occupants in the underground pedestrian street based on the analysis of smoke movement. Such as the
egress of the occupants in underground pedestrian street, fire simulation software FDS and evacuation software Building-Exodus were
used to simulate smoke movement and the egress of the occupants of the underground pedestrian street, which can be obtained the
available safe egress time TASET is 500 s, and required safe egress time T RSET is 454.6 s, comparing the both time, the egress design of the
existing underground pedestrian street can meet the evacuation requirements.
© 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Open access under CC BY-NC-ND license.
© 2012 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
Selection and peer-review under responsibility of School of Engineering of Sun Yat-sen University
Keywords: smoke; underground Pedestrian Street; available safe egress time; required safe egress time; safe egress

Nomenclature
TASET available evacuation time (s)
TRSET evacuation Time(s)
Td alarm time (s)
Tpre response time(s)
Tt travel time(s)
Q heat release rate(kW)
At surface area(m2)
Aw opening area(m2)
hw height of opening(m)

1. Introduction

With the development of the city and population growth, urban land resource available for using is increasingly lacking
[1]
. In this situation, Underground commercial buildings become an important model for sustainable urban development.
However, due to the great quantity of combustible materials, fire loading and evacuation population, evacuation in the
underground commercial buildings is becoming particularly important [2]. The reality shows that fire protection design
method for traditional way has disadvantages to mandatory given by fire safety design for some underground pedestrian
street[3]. As a result, fire performance-based design method puts forward judging methods based on performance and makes
theoretical validation of performance-based method can meet the evacuation requirement on underground pedestrian street

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +8618795427655.

E-mail address: huangli.1028@163.com.

1877-7058 © 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Open access under CC BY-NC-ND license.
Selection and peer-review under responsibility of School of Engineering of Sun Yat-sen University
doi:10.1016/j.proeng.2013.02.121
 Huang Li-li et al. / Procedia Engineering 52 (2013) 158 – 164 159

existing or under construction. This paper does some research on the occupant safe egress of underground pedestrian street
based on the analysis of fire smoke movement taking an underground commercial pedestrian street for an example.

2. Project Overview

A commercial pedestrian street in basement level is length of 71.3 m, high 4.5 m, total construction area of 1652.8 m2.
The center of the pedestrian street is 4 m wide walkway, on both sides of which are commercial shops. The width of door
exports of each shop is 1.5 m and the effective width is 1.2 m [3-4]. Evacuation stairwells of pedestrian street at both end of
passageway are total set four evacuation export, whose effective width is 1.7 m. 10 mechanical smoke exhausts are set in
the upper pedestrian walkway and the amount of a single exhaust port is 16 200 m3/h. The pedestrian design capacity is 855.
Fire detection system and fire radio system are set in the building. Pedestrian plan is shown in Figure 1.

112#room 114#room 116#room 118#room 120#room 122#room 124#room

81.53m 2 78.54m 2 73.70m2 78.54m 2 78.60m 2 78.51m2 53.92m 2

111#room 113#room 115#room 117#room 119#room 121#room 123#room

65.36m2 99.02m 2 80.32m2 78.54m2 73.70m 2 78.54m 2 81.53m 2

Fig.1 Commercial pedestrian street plan

3. Evacuation assessment criterion

Evacuation time includes alarm time, evacuation pre-action time and evacuation action time. Evacuation time judgment
basis is shown in Figure 2.

Fig.2 Sequence of occupant response to fire

The view of fire performance-based design is that the evacuation indicates people evacuate to safe places or locations of
evacuation before the fire developed into the moment of danger to human health. The form of the mathematical description
[6]
is following:

TASET TRSET
(1)

Among them, TASET is personnel available safe egress time, from fire incident moment to fire development moment
posing a danger to human body. TREST is personnel required safe egress time, from fire incident moment to the moment of
160 Huang Li-li et al. / Procedia Engineering 52 (2013) 158 – 164

evacuating to security zones. If equation(1) is set up, we can think the occupants can evacuate from the danger zones to safe
zones before the arrival of danger.

4. Safe Evacuation Analysis

4.1. Evacuation modeling

First, using CAD create underground commercial street plan, only need consider building structures such as walls,
windows, doors, corridors, stairs. Second, import the plan into Building-Exodus defined grille, connecting nodes and add
export, crowd, set the escape scene. Then, after the steps, the model were completed. In the model create 885 people [7],
Occupants should appear randomly within the model. Occupant attributes defined are dependent on SFPE handbook and
Building-Exodus, shown in table 1.

Table 1 Occupant Attributes

Person Type proportion Upstairs speed /(m/s) Downstairs speed/(m/s) Horizontal speed /(m/s)
Man 40% 0.5 0.7 1.0
Woman 40% 0.43 0.6 0.85
old 10% 0.3 0.42 0.59
young 10% 0.33 0.46 0.66

4.2. Evacuation Time

Studies have shown that evacuation time general includes alarm time Td, response time Tpre, and travel time Tt which
should be modified by some safety factor [8]. The safety factor is 1.5, required safe egress time as shown by equation(2).

TRSET Td Tpre 1.5 Tt

(2)

Alarm time Td. Alarm time refers to the time from fire break out to action of automatic fire alarm system. The automatic
fire alarm system would act 30 s~60 s after fire as usual. So, in this project, alarm time is treated as 60 s.
Response time Tpre. Response time refers to the time from people pay attention to alarm system to people make decision
to evacuate. The response time is closely related to automatic fire alarm and building environment. In this project, response
time is treated as 120s.
Travel time Tt. Travel time refers to the time of people evacuation. This time could be calculated by some evacuation
software. In this project, the travel time is predicted by Building-Exodus which is widely used in evacuation simulation. As
shown in Table 2 and Fig.3, we can see that people evacuate completely by each exit at 183.09 s and thus travel time Tt is
treated as 183.09 s.

Fig.3 Evacuation time curve

 Huang Li-li et al. / Procedia Engineering 52 (2013) 158 – 164 161

Table 2 Evacuation of each exit

Exit Total number of evacuees Evacuation travel time /s

Door_1 217 167.6
Door_2 208 164.94
Door_3 209 163.57
Door_4 251 183.09

As stated above, we put alarm time, response time and travel time in equation(2) to predict evacuation time as shown
below.

TRSET Td Tpre 1.5 Tt 60 120 1.5 183.09 454.6s

(3)

5. Smoke Flow Analysis

5.1. Fire scenarios

The factors which should be considered in the setting of fire scenarios mainly include location of fire source, fire growth
rate, fire maximum heat release rate, reliability of fire protection system.
When Water sprinkler system is disabled, the fire in 119# room would grow to flashover. The maximum heat release rate
could be calculated by Thomas model as given by equation(4)

Q 7.8 At 378 Aw hw1/ 2

(4)

Where Q is the heat release rate, kW At is the surface area,m2 Aw is the opening area, m2 hw is the height of
opening, m As stated above, At 226 m 2 Aw 3m 2 hw 2 m , so the heat release rate is 376 kW .
According to the building application and Fire load in 119# room compartment, the fire in 119# room could be described
as Table 3.

Table 3 Fire scenarios

Fire location 119# room

Maximum fire heat release rate 3367 kW
Fire growth rate 0.0469 kW/s2
Ambient temperature / 22

5.2. Available Safe Egress Time

The factors which affect the available evacuation time mainly include height of smoke layer, smoke temperature, smoke
visibility and CO volume fraction .Human tolerance limits of these factors are shown in Table 4~Table 6.

Table 4 Human tolerance limit of smoke temperature[9-10]

Smoke temperature/ tolerance limit /min Smoke temperature/ tolerance limit /min
50 60 130 15
70 60 200~250 5

Table 5 Human tolerance limit of CO volume fraction[11]

162 Huang Li-li et al. / Procedia Engineering 52 (2013) 158 – 164

CO volume fraction tolerance limit CO volume fraction tolerance limit

0.0001 mol·mol-1 Lots hours 0.0025 mol·mol-1 30 min
0.0005 mol·mol-1 60 min 0.010 mol·mol-1 12 min
0.0010 mol·mol-1 60 min 0.0120 mol·mol-1 5 min

Table 6 Human tolerance limit of smoke visibility[12]

Room area 100 m2 100 m2

smoke visibility /m 5.0 10.0

In order to ensure the safety of evacuation, smoke layer should keep more than 2 m from the ground in the process of
evacuation. Meanwhile, as stated above, smoke temperature should be lower than 60 CO volume fraction should be
lower than mol/mol and smoke visibility should be lower than 10 m in the evacuation
As we all know, FDS, one of field simulation software, is developed by National Institute of Standards and Technology
(NIST) and now is used widely in fire research. In this paper, FDS is used to simulate the smoke flow in fire scenarios, as
shown in Fig.4 ~Fig.11.
From smoke distribution plan as shown in Fig.4~Fig.5, we can see that when 119# room catch fire, smoke would fill the
enclosure and then spill to the corridor. Due to the mechanical exhaust port, the smoke would be discharged to the outdoors.
The smoke influence area is mainly located in the 119# enclosure and nearby corridor.
From smoke temperature plan as shown in Fig.6~Fig.7, we can see that apart from 119# enclosure, smoke temperature in
the building is less than 60 in 500 s after ignition.
From smoke plan as shown in Fig.8 ~Fig.9, we can see that apart from 119# enclosure nearby corridor, smoke visibility
in the building is less than 10 m in 500 s after ignition.
From CO volume fraction plan as shown in Fig.10~Fig.11, we can see that apart from 119# enclosure and , CO volume
fraction in the building is less than 500 ppm in 500 s after ignition.
As stated above, we can make one conclusion that the available time for evacuation is 500 s after fire.

Fig.4 smoke distribution at 400 s Fig.5 smoke distribution at 500 s

Fig.6 smoke temperature at 400 s Fig.7 smoke temperature at 500 s

 Huang Li-li et al. / Procedia Engineering 52 (2013) 158 – 164 163

Fig.8 smoke visibility at 400 s Fig.9 smoke visibility at 500 s

Fig.10 CO volume fraction at 400 s Fig.11 CO volume fraction at 500 s

Note : Figure in the black circle within the flue gas Visibility dropped to less than 10 m , reaches a critical value .

6. Conclusion

One field fire simulation software FDS is used to simulate smoke movement to predict the available evacuation time
TASET. Meanwhile, one evacuation software Building-Exodus is also used to simulate the egress of the occupants of the
underground pedestrian street to predict the necessary evacuation time TRSET. By comparing these two data, we can make
one conclusion that the fire fighting system of this project could meet the evacuation requirement.
As stated above in this paper, based on the ideas of performance-based design, one method is proposed to determine the
level of evacuation safety. Combining the field fire simulation software with evacuation software, we could accurately
predict the smoke movement and people evacuation. According comparing available evacuation time with evacuation time,
the level of evacuation safety could be scientific defined.

References
[1]Sun Nan-nan. Underground commercial building fire characteristics and fire rescue. Fire Technique and Products Information.2010,7.
[2]YAO Bin, JIANG Chuan-sheng, LIU Nai-an. Performance-Based Fire Protection Analysis on A Large Underground Shopping Center. Fire Safety
Science.2003,12(4).
[3]Galen E. R. , Owen M. , Gwynne S. . Principles and Practice of Evacuation Modeling[M]. CMS Press, London SE18 6PF, 1997.
[4]NFPA 101.The Life Safety Code,1997 Edition. National Fire Protection association[S],Quincy, USA,1998
[5]NI Zhao peng,WANG Zhi-gang,SHEN Yi-huiCorroboration of safe egress in the performance-based fire protection design.. Fire Science and
Technology.2003,22(5).
[6]DGJ32/J67-2008, Code for fire protection design of commercial building,China
[7]BS DD240: 1997, Fire Safety Engineering in Buildings[S]
[8]LI Yin-qing. Performance-based fire protection design[M].Beijing: Chemical Industry Press, 2005.
[9]FU Rong-sheng. The application of performance-based design on large space exhibition's evacuation. Fire Science and Technology.2011,30(2).
[10]The Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers, Technical Memoranda TM19: Relationships for smoke control calculations[M], London,
Bourne Press Ltd,1995.
[11]George V. Hadjisophocleous, Noureddine Benicho. Performance criteria used in fire safety design[J]. Automation in Construction,1999,8(4):489-501.
[12] ZHU Guo-qing, CHENG Yuan-ping. A performance-based design on smoke prevention and extraction in a large space primary processing workshop
of cigarette [J]. Journal of Xi'an University of Science and Technology 2008,28(2)
[13] DGJ08-88-2000. The Technical Regulation of Smoke Control in Civil Building[S].
[14] Liang Li-jun. Performance-based design of Building Fire Safety[J]. Construction Safety,2009,08:42-43.
[15] Fan Wei-Cheng, Sun Jin-Hua, Lu Shou-Xiang. Fire risk assessment methodology [M]. Beijing: Science Press,2004:55-60.
164 Huang Li-li et al. / Procedia Engineering 52 (2013) 158 – 164

[16] Custer R L P, MEACHAM B J. Introduction to performance-based fire safety [M]. Boston, MA, USA: Society of Fire Protection Engineers, 1997: 96
- 100.
[17] CHENG Yuan ping, CHEN Liang, ZHANG Meng jun.The Models and Experimental Testing Method of Heat Release Rate of Fuel During the
Development of Fire[J]. Fire Safety Science 2002,11(2)