CFD modeling of road tunnel fires

Tunnel fire experiments are often based on a specific test condition such as air velocity, geometry or tunnel slope which may be different from the design conditions of an actual tunnel project. The capability of the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) to reproduce the consequences of pool fires in confined environments, such as those in road tunnels, has been tested. The use of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) in this field can be useful especially for the development of fire protection systems and for designing adequate ventilation systems and the necessary escape routes. Different tunnel fire scenarios, realized at different scales, have been considered in this study; it was evidenced the influence of different parameters on the smoke and fire dynamics. For all the analyzed cases, FDS has made a fairly good description of the experiments, evidencing a good agreement between model predictions and experimental measurements. The successful comparison of the code to the experimental results further support the use of this code for the simulation of fire dynamics and for the evaluation of the risk associated with fires in confined environments and in road tunnels