Numerical Experiments on Critical Ventilation Velocity and Back-layer in Tunnel Fire

Full-scale numerical experiments were carried out on the vehicular fire in a long tunnel to study the critical ventilation velocity and back-layer distance with heat release rate of 5, 20 and 100 MW respectively. A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model of fire-driven fluid flow FDS(Fire Dynamics Simulator) was used to solve numerically a form of the Navier-Stokes equations for fire. The results were compared with the expressions proposed in the literature. A modified equation for the critical ventilation velocity was given to better fit the experimental results. A bi-exponential model that well fitted the numerical experimental results was proposed to describe the relationship between back-layer distance and ventilation velocity.