Experimental and numerical evacuation study in tall office building

Ivanov, Martin Lyubomirov; Chow, Wan Ki

doi:10.1016/j.jobe.2023.107103

Cited by 7 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 34 publications

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“…Obtaining real fire evacuation data in hazardous situations is challenging, leading to the use of fire drill data as an alternative to approximate evacuee responses in real emergencies. Several studies have compiled evacuation drill data to understand occupant evacuation behavior, serving as a basis for constructing evacuation models [11,[13][14][15][16][17]. Some researchers have conducted unannounced fire drills to enhance the realism of the data and explore evacuees' behavior [11,14].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Critical Egress Parameters Governing Assisted Evacuation in Hospital Buildings

Kodur,

Jha,

Lajnef

2024

Fire

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This paper presents the critical egress parameters that influence emergency evacuation in a typical hospital building. A parametric study of a 20-story hospital building is conducted using a computer model “Pathfinder” to simulate the evacuation efficiency and assess the influencing parameters. The main egress parameters that influence the evacuation efficiency, including the location of stairways, number of stairways, location of the fire, exit width, and number of low-speed occupants are varied. Two scenarios are simulated: one being the regular (practice) evacuation drill and the other is the actual fire drill. The result shows that the location of stairways significantly affects the total evacuation time with the optimal stairway arrangement consisting of one stairway outside the core of the building. Similarly, the story level at which the fire occurs is another key parameter with fires at lower levels being critical to dictating the evacuation time in a hospital building. The total evacuation time when the fire occurs between the third and sixth floor is found to be 170 min which is 36% and 15% higher than fires at the top story levels (15–18th floor) and the intermediate story levels (9–12th floor), respectively.

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