Effect of tunnel fire: Analysis and remedial measures

The paper aims at improving the understanding and mitigating the effects of tunnel fires that may breakout due to the burning fuel and/or explosion within the tunnel. This study particularly focuses on the behavior of the commonly used horse shoe geometry of tunnel systems. The problem has been obtained using an adequate well-established program incorporating the Lagrangian approach. A transient-thermo-coupled static structural analysis is carried out. The effects of radiation and convection to the outer walls of the tunnel is studied. The paper also presents the impact of the hazard on the structural integrity of the tunnel. A methodology is proposed to study the tunnel fire using a model which uses equivalent steel sheet to represent the presence of reinforcements to improve the computational efficiency with adequate validation. A parametric study has been carried out and the effect of suitable lining property for mitigating the fire hazard is arrived at. Detailed analysis is done for the threshold limits of the properties of the lining material to check if it is acceptable in all aspects for the integrity of the tunnel. The study may prove useful for developing insights for ensuring tunnel fire safety. To conduct such studies experimentally are tremendously costly but are required to gain confidence. But, scaled models, as well as loading and testing conditions, cannot be studied by many trials experimentally as the cost will shoot up sharply. In this context, the results obtained from such computational studies with a feasible variation of various combinations of parameters may act as a set of guidelines to freeze the adequate combination of various parameters to conduct one or two costly experiments for confidence building.