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The problem of fires in tunnels is reviewed and new experimental data are presented which show for possibly the first time that the established correlations between fire size and critical ventilation velocity appear to be incorrect at large fire sizes; the dependence of these data upon the particular tunnel geometry is also evident. The departure from previous expectations is attributed to non-Boussinesq effects and tilting of the fire plume in the downstream direction. The Boussinesq approximation, implicit in standard correlations, is considered to be inappropriate for a study of the dynamics of hot smoke layers due to the significant effects of large density gradients on the horizontal momentum equation.

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A series of full-scale tunnel fire tests were conducted in Norway under the EUREKA EU499 firetun project, a cooperative venture involving participants from several European countries. The Channel Tunnel operators, Eurotunnel, were represented during a test designed to simulate a burning heavy goods vehicle (HGV) being conveyed on a freight shuttle train within the Channel Tunnel. The experimental tunnel was extensively instrumented to enable the progress of the fire to be monitored. In this paper, it is shown how the data on CO and C02 production rates were used to calculate the rate of heat release as a function of time and provide an estimate of the maximum heat release rate.