• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.363-377
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• 2018

The proper functioning of critical points on transport infrastructure is decisive for the entire network. Tunnels and bridges certainly belong to the critical points of the surface transport network, both road and rail. Risk management should be a holistic and dynamic process throughout the entire life cycle. However, the level of risk is usually determined only during the design stage mainly due to the fact that it is a time-consuming and costly process. This paper presents a simplified quantitative risk analysis method that can be used any time during the decades of a tunnel's lifetime and can estimate the changing risks on a continuous basis and thus uncover hidden safety threats. The presented method is a decision support system for tunnel managers designed to preserve or even increase tunnel safety. The CAPITA method is a deterministic scenario-oriented risk analysis approach for assessment of mortality risks in road tunnels in case of the most dangerous situation - a fire. It is implemented through an advanced risk analysis CAPITA SW. Both, the method as well as the resulting software were developed by the authors' team. Unlike existing analyzes requiring specialized microsimulation tools for traffic flow, smoke propagation and evacuation modeling, the CAPITA contains comprehensive database with the results of thousands of simulations performed in advance for various combinations of variables. This approach significantly simplifies the overall complexity and thus enhances the usability of the resulting risk analysis. Additionally, it provides the decision makers with holistic view by providing not only on the expected risk but also on the risk's sensitivity to different variables. This allows the tunnel manager or another decision maker to estimate the primary change of risk whenever traffic conditions in the tunnel change and to see the dependencies to particular input variables.

• Tunnel and Underground Space
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.100-107
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• 1997

In case of a fire outbreak in a uni-directional road tunnel, the flow of traffic immediately behind the fire disaster will be stalled all the way back to the entrance of the tunnel. Furthermore, when the vehicle passengers try to flee away from the fire toward the entrance of the tunnel, the extremely hot fume that propagates in the same direction will be fatal to the multitudes evacuating, but may also cause damage to the ventilation equipments and the vehicles, compounding the evacuation process. This paper will present the 3-dimensional modelling analysis of the preventive measures of such a fume propagation in the same direction as the evacuating passengers. For the analysis, the fire hazard was assumed to be a perfect combustion of methane gas injected through the 1 m X 2 m nozzle in the middle of the tunnel, and the product of $CO_2$ as the indicator of the fume propagation. From the research results, when the fire hazard occurred in middle of the 400 m road tunnel, the air density decreased around the fire point, and the maximum temperatures were 996 K and 499 K at 210 m and 350 m locations, respectively, 60 seconds after fire disaster occurred, when the fumes were driven out only towards the exit-direction of the tunnel. By tracing the increase of $CO_2$ level over 1% mole fraction, the minimum longitudinal ventilation velocity was found to be 2.40 m/sec. Furthermore, through Analysis of the temperature distribution graphs, and observation of the cross-sectional distribution of $CO_2$ over 1% mole fraction, it was found that the fume did not mix with the air, but rather moved far in a laminar flow towards exit of the tunnel.