Task 5.4: Design of fire safety and evacuation strategy for buildings
Task Leader(s): Dr. Shorab Jain
Objective:
- Assessment of Fire Hazard and Design of Fire Safety Systems for Mass Housing.
- Simulation of Spread of Smoke inside building
- Developing emergency response strategies using coupled fire simulation and virtual technology for suggesting improvements in building plan
Description of Task:
There are number of fire instances, which have raised concern regarding fire safety in high rise buildings. Therefore, it becomes essential to carry out systematic design for an effective fire protection system and timely evacuation of occupants from burning buildings.
The failure of timely evacuations of occupants from burning buildings result from improper layout of building structure and unreasonable choices made by occupants due to panic or unfamiliarity with building. In current evacuation models, the evacuation behavior is predicted mathematically. However human responses and behavior are quite complex during fires and difficult to predict correctly. For accurate predictions of human behavior emergency evacuation training and drills are conducted in real buildings which has disadvantages of high cost, limited repetitiveness and inherent danger.
This research makes use of Virtual Reality Technique coupled with fire simulations to study behavior of fire inside a built environment and to assess human response for timely evacuation from the building. This will help in evaluating whether building designs are reasonable. This will do away with the need of emergency evacuation training and drills in real buildings by conducting evacuation training and drills in virtual environment overcoming the disadvantages of high cost, poor repetitiveness and inherent danger in real buildings.
Virtual reality technology in conjunction with fire simulations in buildings has not been done in the country so far for developing fire evacuation strategies in case of fire disaster.
Deliverables:
- Design of fire safety system-detection/ suppression and prediction of spread of smoke inside building
- Design guidelines for fire evacuation strategies in mass housing projects