ABSTRACT
The vertical emergency staircase of a deep-buried subway station has many problems such as long distance, difficulty in getting out of the ground, and expensive costs, which makes against for people to escape a fire. In the paper, taking the Chongqing Railway Line 10 Red Land Station as a model, a new smoke control strategy by eliminating the vertical emergency staircase and installing an air curtain over the long entrance corridor has been proposed. The Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) was used to investigate the air curtain parameters and to model a scenario where people use an air curtain passageway to escape. The Pathfinder software was used to simulate the movement of the flow of people. The results show that the air curtain can be used in long entrances and exits of metro stations without intermediate vertical evacuation staircases. When the distance between the air curtain and fire source is 1m, the best combination for blocking the smoke is as follows: air curtain jet speed of 15m/s, jet angle of 15°, and two air curtains interval of 12 m. While the distance between the air curtain and fire source is 4 m, and the best and most economical condition is the jet speed of 11 m/s, jet angle of 15°, and two air curtains with an interval of 12 m. This project could provide theoretical support for the extension of air curtain application to metro inter-district tunnels.
