Pressure on the use of land and environmental protection increasingly mean that new road and rail transport infrastructure is being placed underground in tunnels, with all the inherent fire challenges that this presents. This Digest provides good practice guidance on the application of fire safety engineering principles to tunnels. It briefly covers a range of issues related to tunnel fire safety, fire safety engineering and consideration of some tunnel-specific issues related to the sub-systems of fire safety engineering. It also lists references for further reading and where to obtain further information. Helps identify safe and cost-effective design solutions for fire safety in tunnels

Features and benefits
Explains fire safety engineering and particular issues for tunnel safety
Extensive references to the literature

Illustrations
4 line drawings, 2 photos

Pages: 12

Contents

1 Introduction and background

• Tunnel functions
• Tunnel contents
• Tunnel users
• Tunnel layout and arrangements

2 Fire engineering process

3 Qualitative design review

4 Quantitative analysis

• Initiation and growth of fire
• Design fires
• Smoke movement
• Computational fluid dynamics
  • Tunnel ventilation and fire plume interactions
  • Smoke extraction systems
• Fire resistance
• Activation of fire detection and suppression
  • Fire detection
  • Fire suppression
• Fire service Intervention
• Response of people and evacuation
• Fire risk analysis
  • Quantitative fire risk analysis
  • Fire risk assessment using points schemes or risk indices
• 4 Conclusions
• References