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The Impact of Smoke on Walking Speed

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Author

Summary, in English

In fire safety engineering, information about the expected walking speed of occupants through smoke is one factor that is of great interest to the designer. However, despite the fact that research already in the 1970s demonstrated that people tend to evacuate through smoke, little research has been performed on the topic, and evidently there is a lack of data on walking speed in smoke. This has created a situation where fire safety engineering assessments of the RSET may be intimately associated with great uncertainties, especially for buildings in which in which people can be expected to evacuate long distances through smoke, e.g., underground transportation systems. In order to address the lack of data on movement through smoke, 133 data points on individual walking speed in smoke are presented in this paper. The presented data lies within an extinction coefficient range from 1.2 to 7.5 m-1 (approximately corresponding to a visibility interval of 2.4-0.4 m for reflecting objects). In addition, recommendations are given on how designers should treat the data in their fire safety risk assessments, depending on the type of risk analysis method, i.e., if the designer is performing a deterministic analysis, or a quantitative risk analysis (QRA). It is argued that this information can be used to reduce the uncertainty in future risk analyses that involve egress calculations.

Publishing year

2013

Language

English

Pages

955-965

Publication/Series

[Host publication title missing]

Volume

2

Document type

Conference paper

Publisher

Interscience Communications Ltd

Topic

  • Building Technologies
  • Other Civil Engineering

Conference name

International Interflam Conference, Interflam 2013

Conference date

2013-06-24 - 2013-06-26

Conference place

London, United Kingdom

Status

Published

Research group

  • Evacuation

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISBN: 978-0-9556548-9-3