Investigation of effectiveness of emergency ventilation strategies in the event of fires in road tunnels

A research project is being conducted at the National Research Council of Canada (AIRC) to evaluate the effectiveness of current emergency ventilation strategies to control smoke spread in the event of afire in two road tunnels. The research study includes numerical and experimental phases. The numerical phase uses computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models to study smoke ventilation in the tunnels. The experimental phase is used to calibrate and to partially validate the chosen CFD models and to provide the necessary initial and boundary conditions. SOLVENT a CFD model, was used to model ventilation scenarios using existing data. The current paper presents the efforts to validate the CFD model against on-site flow and fire test measurements conducted in a 1.8 km road tunnel. The CFD model includes aerodynamically significant physical features of the tunnel and is customized to provide general roughness replicating the actual roughness in the tunnel.