Tunnel ventilation in practice – insights from testing (original) (raw)

Underground. The Way to the Future, 2013

Abstract

Ventilation is one of the most important systems that enhances the safety of a tunnel. Most ventilation systems are designed in first order for the emergency case, i.e. the fire ventilation, and many are hardly ever used in normal operation. Only by rigorous testing, the practical functionality of equipment and the whole system can be proven. Besides the usual factory and site acceptance tests of equipment, the focus is on the proper control algorithms and integral functionality of the whole system. The control of the longitudinal airflow is essential to confine the spread of smoke. Realistic smoke tests prove the proper function of the automatic smoke detection and show the performance of the fire ventilation. Practical experience from those tests leads to findings that should be considered in the concept and design process. This is particularly important where requirements in actual design guidelines were based mostly on mere theoretical considerations. In this article, the safety goals, testing procedures and findings are presented on examples for different tunnel types: long alpine tunnels with bidirectional traffic and a short two-tube city tunnel with unidirectional traffic.

Petr Pospisil hasn't uploaded this paper.

Let Petr know you want this paper to be uploaded.

Ask for this paper to be uploaded.