ABSTRACT
In modern transit systems, maintaining air quality, environmental control, and Fire Life Safety within the underground portion of the system is an important component of the overall design and its compliance with the established life safety and comfort guidelines and standards. Typical, Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems do not have sufficient capacity to control the heat and smoke from a large train fire at the station platform. Therefore, emergency ventilation and smoke control of the tunnels is combined with that in the underground stations. These emergency ventilation systems (EVS’s) require a large space and are often housed inside the stations that serve the underground portion of the transit system. Since underground portions of transit systems are often in dense urban areas, real estate and construction costs present a challenge to the system designers and minimizing the space requirements of the EVS becomes of paramount importance. An introduction to the principles of tunnel ventilation is presented and application of these principles in the underground portion of the Réseau Express Métropolitain (REM) in the new Montreal Airport Tunnel is discussed. The presentation includes the theoretical background, design criteria, regulatory requirements, analysis methods, and advanced numerical techniques used in developing the design of the tunnel ventilation system (TVS) and their specific application in the underground portion of the REM project. The proposed TVS design is presented, and results of the analysis are discussed.
