HGV traffic – Consequences in case of a tunnel fire

Published: 12 April, 2010

This paper describes part of a risk analysis that was done for a major urban road tunnel to see if there were significant differences in risk level depending of the type of HGV traffic that were allowed into the tunnel. The paper specifically describes the consequence analysis that was performed.

A typical design fire for an HGV (Heavy Goods Vehicle) for major urban tunnels carrying a mix of cars and trucks in the past has been set at 30-50MW. However, recent research has shown that fires involving HGV’s and multiple vehicles can reach peak heat release rates of the order of 100-200MW or more. Standards and codes are now taking this “new” data into account and design fire sizes are being updated.

Two different types of HGV fires were used in the analysis (approx. 110 MW and 190MW); these sizes were based on the typical HGV traffic that was foreseen as using the tunnel. The analysis looks into the type of consequences originating from the two fire sizes (damage to systems, damage to structure, etc.).

The paper also investigates the use of CFD modeling (Computational Fluid Dynamics) vs Hand
calculations (numerical formulas) for this purpose. It was considered important to see if these two approaches gave different results in terms of consequences (damage to the tunnel).

File: 126-135_HGV traffic.pdf (514k)

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