Experimental study on the movement characteristics of 5-6 years old Chinese children when egressing from a pre-school building

Because of the difference in body size and athletic ability, children' evacuation characteristic is different from that of adults. Therefore, one of the important work of ensuring safety in the emergency evacuation process of pre-school building is to extract the specific evacuation parameters of children. In this study, an evacuation experiment is conducted in a pre-school building in China, and then the evacuation process of 84 children aged 5-6 years is extracted and analyzed. Several key factors have a significant influence on the children evacuation process during the experiments: the guidance of teachers, stairs or steps and congestion on the transition platform. The critical movement parameters of children are extracted and then compared with the existing results. There are distinct differences between adults and children: the average speed of children is lower, which is 0.81 +/- 0.40 m/s in the corridor and 0.63 +/- 0.20 m/s on the stairs; but children could move faster at the same density; furthermore, children could still maintain a high evacuation efficiency at higher density; at last, the equations of velocity-density and flow-density for children aged 5-6 are presented according to the experiment results. These results could provide basic parameters for the design of evacuation facilities and the prediction of evacuation process in pre-school buildings.