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A Multi-Grid Model for Evacuation Coupling with the Effects of Fire Products

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Abstract

In the study, influences of fire products on pedestrians are introduced into a multi-grid evacuation model, in which the space is discretized into small grids with the size of 0.1 m × 0.1 m and each pedestrian occupies 5 × 5 grid sites. The fire products affect two walking parameters of pedestrians: the desired movement direction and the step frequency. The data of fire products are obtained from the simulation results of the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS), a well-founded computational fluid dynamic (CFD) program, developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). With this model, we investigated the routes of pedestrians in fires, and the evacuation times in scenarios with different fire intensities, pre-movement times or door widths. The results indicate that pedestrians will avoid moving towards the fire source, small fire may make egress process faster while large fire may reduce evacuation efficiency significantly, the movement time increases rapidly with the increasing pre-movement time, and the door width plays a more important role for evacuation in fire than normal condition. Furthermore, for the evacuation from a hall with two exits our model can reproduce the inefficient use of exits and predict the optimal condition that results in least evacuation time.

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Acknowledgements

The study is supported by China National Natural Science Foundation (psychological reaction, evacuation behavior and intervention of mass crowd in unconventional emergency), and Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University (NCET-08-0518).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. SKLFS, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui, 230026, People’s Republic of China

    Zhi-Ming Fang, Wei-Guo Song & Hao Wu

  2. Institute for Building Material Technology and Fire Safety Science, Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Pauluskirchstrasse 11, 42285, Wuppertal, Germany

    Jun Zhang

Authors
  1. Zhi-Ming Fang
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  2. Wei-Guo Song
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  3. Jun Zhang
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  4. Hao Wu
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Correspondence to Wei-Guo Song.

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Fang, ZM., Song, WG., Zhang, J. et al. A Multi-Grid Model for Evacuation Coupling with the Effects of Fire Products. Fire Technol 48, 91–104 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10694-010-0173-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10694-010-0173-x

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