• Journal of the Korean Society for Railway
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• v.10 no.5
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• pp.511-519
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• 2007

This study provides comprehensive design improvements covering technical issues concerning life safety matter In case of fire train stoppage in the middle of a tunnel. Recently Government announced that most of subway platforms will have screen doors in 3 years. Therefore, many fire safety engineers considered that they may contribute on life safety on train stoppage in tunnel. Especially The screen door can protect platform from smoke along tunnel ceiling when fire train stopped in tunnel. The study showed that platform ventilation ducts and the a tunnel ventilation chimney in the middle of tunnel in exiting subway tunnel could not guarantee life safety ability in terms of RSET vs. ASET comparison. Furthermore during evacuation process many peoples may be threatened from the smoke spread from the origin of fire. Although only additional vertical route can be installed in tunnels In order to decrease RSET, it will costs high or no spaces remains in outside on the road. The study suggested that increase of ASET can be best solution without additional escape route, therefore alternative design methods suggested on the base of simulation results. Finally the study shows alternative methods can give good result in terms of evacuation performance evaluation. The evacuation performance evaluation helps the decision-maker to determine the preferred alternatives or upgrades to existing tunnel infrastructure and other measure to meet safety objectives. Finally, the study details the effectiveness of measures the can be taken to reduce the risk of incidents in subway tunnels.

• Fire Science and Engineering
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• v.31 no.3
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• pp.137-143
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• 2017

A sufficient number of ambulances are critical for preventing delayed vehicle dispatch for emergency patients. This study presents effective methodologies for evaluating the effects of ambulance quantities on availability. The statistical properties of the emergency requests and responses were analyzed for a city in Korea. The inter-request times were modeled by statistical distributions. The ambulance dispatch was modeled using simulation, reflecting the shared dispatch among the city districts. The simulation results revealed that the existing ambulance quantity could successfully meet the majority of the requests, but more vehicles were desirable for improvement. The locations of the additional vehicles were determined efficiently by simulations with a greedy approach. The simulations with added vehicles showed a significantly better coverage of the emergency calls. This research can help design improved emergency vehicle operations, and help save lives.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.35 no.5
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• pp.1157-1163
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• 2015

The purpose of this study is to reveal the effects of the number of users and their spatial distribution on the evacuation time in a road tunnel in the event of a fire. An agent-based evacuation model was implemented using Netlogo following the ODD protocol. The proposed model illustrates how the evacuation behavior of one can hinder others across different evacuation environments. Simulations show that evacuation time increases with the number of users when they are randomly located in a road tunnel.

• Atmosphere
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.227-235
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• 2009

Global climate warming induced by long-lived greenhouse gases is expected to cause increases in wildfire frequencies and intensity in boreal forest regions of mid- and high-latitudes in the future. Siberian forest fires are one of important sources for air pollutants such as ozone and aerosols over East Asia. Thus an accurate quantification of forest fire influences on air quality is crucial, in particular considering its higher occurrences expected under the future warming climate conditions. We here use the 3-D global chemical transport model (GEOS-Chem) with the satellite constrained fire emissions to quantify Siberian fire effects on ozone concentrations in East Asia. Our focus is mainly on spring 2003 when the largest fires occurred over Siberia in the past decade. We first evaluated the model by comparing to the EANET observations. The model reproduced observed ozone concentrations in spring 2003 with the high $R^2$ of 0.77 but slightly underestimated by 20%. Enhancements in seasonal mean ozone concentrations were estimated from the difference in simulations with and without Siberian fires and amounted up to 24 ppbv over Siberia. Effects of Siberian fires also resulted in 3-10 ppbv incresases in Korea and Japan. These increases account for about 5-15% of the ozone air quality standard of 60 ppbv in Korea, indicating a significant effect of Siberian fires on ozone concentrations. We found however that possible changes in regional meteorology due to Siberian fires may also affect air quality. Further study on the interaction between regional air quality and meteorology is necessary in the future.

• Fire Science and Engineering
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• v.33 no.4
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• pp.89-96
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• 2019

In this study, alarm sound generated as a priority alert system propagation through an elevator shaft in apartment buildings were simulated using room acoustic simulation software. The simulations were conducted on three kinds of elevator hall plan with a different number of elevators and placement. First, the elevator shaft without sound absorption material was simulated as a condition of the present. When the distance from the alarm sound generating floor became farther, alarm sound level was decreased. However, the alarm sound level three-floor distance was about 54 dB(A)~56 dB(A) which were louder than a background sound level of typical apartment buildings. Sound absorption material placement proposed by previous studies were simulated and the alarm sound levels were decreased about 12 dB~16 dB. These levels were similar or lower than the background level of apartment buildings. From these results, it can be concluded that placing sound absorption material on the surface of the elevator shaft wall can be one of the methods to control the alarm sound as regulated in NFSC.

• Journal of KIBIM
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.70-79
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• 2022

As BIM(Building Information Modeling) technology advances in architecture around the world, projects and industries using BIM are increasing. Unlike previous developments that were limited to buildings, BIM is now spreading to other fields such as civil engineering and electricity. In architecture, BIM is used in the entire process from design to maintenance of a building, and IFC(Industry Foundation Classes), a neutral format with interoperability, is used as an open BIM format. Since firefighting requires intuitive 3D models for evacuation and fire simulations, BIM models are desirable. However, due to the BIM model, which was developed centered on building objects, there are no objects and specific properties for fire evacuation in the IFC scheme. Therefore, in this study, when adding a new object in the firefighting area to the IFC schema, the IFC interoperability is not broken and the building WBS(Work Breakdown Structure) is analyzed with a hierarchical system similar to the IFC format to define the scope for a new object and the firefighting part within of the building WBS to derive a firefighting HBS(Hierarchy Breakdown Structure) with the extension of the object-oriented IFC file. And according to HBS, we propose an IFC schema extension method. It is a methodology that allows BIM users to instantly adapt the IFC schema to their needs. Accordingly, the methodology derived from this study is expected to be expanded in various areas to minimize information loss from IFC. In the future, we will apply the IFC extension methodology to the actual development process using HBS to verify that it is actually applicable within the IFC schema.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.38 no.3
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• pp.27-34
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• 2023

With the technological development of the semiconductor industry, the roles of electrical and thermal energy supply and control of semiconductor equipment in ultrafine processes have become very important. However, instances of electrical fires in the chiller heater, which is used for cooling in the semiconductor manufacturing process, are increasing. A fire occurs in combustibles due to high heat at the connection part of the chiller heater, that is, when the number of electrical wires in the connection part is reduced or when the wires are completely disconnected. In this study, the temperature characteristics were compared and analyzed through experiments and 3D simulations. The number of electrical wires, which is the connection part of the chiller heater, was reduced by 90%, 50%, 30%, 10%, and 5%, and the wires were completely disconnected. When the number of electrical wires was reduced by 5%, heat of up to 80℃ was generated, which is a relatively high temperature but insufficient to cause a fire in combustibles. Complete disconnection occurred due to the vibration of the motor and other components, and sparks and arcs were generated, resulting in a rapid increase in temperature to up to 680℃. When completely disconnected, the temperature increase was sufficient to cause a fire in the combustibles covering the terminal block. Therefore, in this study, the causes of electrical fires in chiller heaters were investigated and preventive measures were proposed by analyzing abnormal signals and thermal characteristics caused by the electrical wiring being reduced and completely disconnected.

• Fire Science and Engineering
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• v.28 no.6
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• pp.13-21
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• 2014

Forest fire has a number of variables and since the effects of wind fields are bigger than any other variables, it is essential to know wind direction and velocity for the forest fire extinguishing techniques and the prediction of fire spread. With regards to the local area that has a high chance of forest fire, the data from meteorological observatory in the area is used for the estimation of wind velocity. It is relatively easy to obtain automatic weather station (AWS) data which are available for the whole nation. There is a chance that the data from the weather station may be different with the actual data at the mountain areas. In this study simply shaped hills (Sae-byeol hill of Jeju Island and port Ma-geum in An-myeon Island in the sea side) were selected as the experimental locations to minimize the distortion of the wind field by the adjacent geographic features. Spot measurements and analysis of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) for the given geographic features were conducted to examine and compare their consistency. As a conclusion It is possible to predict wind patterns in these simple locations.

• Fire Science and Engineering
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• v.32 no.1
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• pp.7-15
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• 2018

The prediction performance of combustion models in the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) were evaluated by comparing with experiment for compartment propane gas fires. The mixture fraction model in the FDS v5.5.3 and Eddy Dissipation Concept (EDC) model in the FDS v6.6.3 were adopted in the simulations. Four chemical reaction mechanisms, such as 1-step Mixing Controlled, 2-step Mixing Controlled, 3-step Mixing Controlled and 3-step Mixed (Mixing Controlled + finite chemical reactions) reactions, were implemented in the EDC model. The simulation results with each combustion model showed similar level for the temperature inside the compartment. The prediction performance of FDS with each combustion model showed significant differences for the CO concentration while no distinguished differences were identified for the $O_2$ and $CO_2$ concentrations. The EDC 3-step Mixing Controlled largely over-predicted the CO concentration obtained by experiment and the mixture fraction model under-predicted the experiment slightly. The EDC 3-step Mixed showed the best prediction performance for the CO concentration and the EDC 2-step Mixing Controlled also predicted the CO concentration reasonably. The EDC 1-step Mixing Controlled significantly under-predict the experimental CO concentration when the previously suggested CO yield was adopted. The FDS simulation with the EDC 1-step Mixing Controlled showed difficulties in predicting the $CO_2$ concentration when the CO yield was modified to predict the CO concentration reasonably.

• Korean Journal of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.192-205
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• 2009

The unexpected wind over the Mt. Hwawang on 9 February 2009 was deadly when many spectators were watching a traditional event to burn dried grasses and the fire went out of control due to the wind. We analyzed the fatal wind based on wind flow simulations over a digitized complex terrain of the mountain with a localized heating area using a three dimensional computational fluid dynamics model, CFD_NIMR_SNU (Computational Fluid Dynamics_National Institute of Meteorological Research_Seoul National University). Three levels of fire intensity were simulated: no fire, $300^{\circ}C$ and $600^{\circ}C$ of surface temperature at the site on fire. The surface heat accelerated vertical wind speed by as much as $0.7\;m\;s^{-1}$ (for $300^{\circ}C$) and $1.1\;m\;s^{-1}$ (for $600^{\circ}C$) at the center of the fire. Turbulent kinetic energy was increased by the heat itself and by the increased mechanical force, which in turn was generated by the thermal convection. The heating together with the complex terrain and strong boundary wind induced the unexpected high wind conditions with turbulence at the mountain. The CFD_NIMR_SNU model provided valuable analysis data to understand the consequences of the fatal mountain fire. It is suggested that the place of fire was calm at the time of the fire setting due to the elevated terrain of the windward side. The suppression of wind was easily reversed when there was fire, which caused updraft of hot air by the fire and the strong boundary wind. The strong boundary wind in conjunction with the fire event caused the strong turbulence, resulting in many fire casualties. The model can be utilized in turbulence forecasting over a small area due to surface fire in conjunction with a mesoscale weather model to help fire prevention at the field.