Numerical study of air curtain systems for blocking smoke in tunnel fires

A tunnel fire is very dangerous to drivers because of generated poisonous gases. For dealing with this hazardous situation, ventilation systems for smoke control are installed so that drivers can be safely evacuated from the site of the fire. An air curtain system is one of these ventilation systems, and such a system in a tunnel generates an air wall to block the passage of poisonous gases. In this study, airflow discharge patterns of air curtain systems were analyzed using Computational fluid dynamics (CFD), with two design parameters—to predict the ability of the air curtain to block the contaminated adverse air-flow in the tunnel. The considered two design parameters were the installed angle of the slit nozzle (NA) and the discharged air velocity at the slit nozzle outlet (NV). The tunnel geometry for the CFD analysis was a two-lane type with a tunnel length of 100 m and an elliptical cross section. The height of the tunnel was approximately 7.3 m and the height of the installed air curtain was about 4.9 m from the road surface. In this study, the heat release rates of the fire, the distance from the fire site, and the temperature of the working fluid were respectively assumed to about 20 MW, 50 m and 473 K, on the basis of the NFPA 502. The CFD analysis demonstrated that an NA of 0 deg could not block the adverse air flow due to a realistic tunnel inlet-outlet static pressure difference (ΔPS). An NA of 20 deg was required to effectively block the adverse flow. The blocking failure first formed at the sidewall of the tunnel, and it proceeded toward the center of the tunnel cross section when the adverse wind was strong. That aspect of the blocking failure was judged to be due to the fact that the tunnel cross section is elliptical. Anyway, when the tunnel ΔPS was increased, that showed the need for a high NV.