The study of tunnel fires is important in the design of long vehicle tunnels in terms of fire management system, emergency exit, and ventilation system. The physical behavior of tunnel fires can be investigated experimentally or numerically. The difficulty of experimental study is that a reduced-scale test cannot imitate the characteristics of a full-scale fire due to their different turbulent scales. Therefore, most fire tests have been conducted in full-scale tunnels. This is costly and time consuming. Numerical simulation aided by full-scale test is the pragmatic approach in the investigation of this problem. However, a real fire in long tunnels resulting from the burning of a car or a truck is extremely complex and very difficult to simulate. This is because a vehicle consists of many different materials and the burning process involves many complex chemical reactions. In order to reduce considerably the complexities of simulations, the fire is treated as a predetermined heat source in the present study. A finite difference method, which solves the unsteady, compressible, three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations and the energy equation, is employed to simulate this physical problem. The comparison of numerical results with experimental data demonstrates that the proposed method can be an effective engineering tool when dealing with fires in the design of long vehicle tunnels.
Keywords: fire, tunnel, numerical simulation.
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