Pedestrian evacuation at the subway station under fire

• Published in: Chinese physics B Vol. 25; no. 4; pp. 486 - 494
• Main Author: 杨晓霞 董海荣 姚秀明 孙绪彬
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 01.04.2016
• Subjects: Density; Emergencies; Evacuation; Fires; Pedestrians; Platforms; Smoke; Subway stations; 仿真结果; 地铁车站; 城市轨道交通; 安全疏散; 火灾动力学; 空气温度; 突发事件; 行人
• ISSN: 1674-1056; 2058-3834; 1741-4199
• DOI: 10.1088/1674-1056/25/4/048902

With the development of urban rail transit, ensuring the safe evacuation of pedestrians at subway stations has become an important issue in the case of an emergency such as a fire. This paper chooses the platform of line 4 at the Beijing Xu- anwumen subway station to study the emergency evacuation process under fire. Based on the established platform, effects of the fire dynamics, different initial pedestrian densities, and positions of fire on evacuation are investigated. According to simulation results, it is found that the fire increases the air temperature and the smoke density, and decreases pedestrians＇- visibility and walking velocity. Also, there is a critical initial density at the platform if achieving a safe evacuation within the required 6 minutes. Furthermore, different positions of fire set in this paper have little difference on crowd evacuation if the fire is not large enough. The suggestions provided in this paper are helpful for the subway operators to prevent major casualties.