Open Access

ARTICLE

Study on Evacuation Strategy of Commercial High-Rise Building under Fire Based on FDS and Pathfinder

Zheng Yan¹, Ying Wang^1,*, Longxiao Chao¹, Jian Guo²

1 Key Laboratory of Concrete and Prestressed Concrete Structures of Ministry of Education, Southeast University, Nanjing, 210096, China
2 Nanjing Yang Zi State-Owned Investment Group, Nanjing, 210096, China

* Corresponding Author: Ying Wang. Email:

Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences 2024, 138(2), 1077-1102. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmes.2023.030023

Received 19 March 2023; Accepted 21 June 2023; Issue published 17 November 2023

Abstract

With the development of economy and society and the growth of population, the high-rise and multi-function of commercial buildings have become an international trend. But it also poses huge fire hazards. Most of the existing studies’ research objects are predominantly high-rise residential buildings, without considering the impact of different functional zones (Standard floor, entertainment zone, office zone, equipment room and so on) and personnel distribution of commercial buildings evacuation. And the influence of using elevators to carry evacuees on the refuge floor on personnel evacuation is rarely studied. In this work, the fire scenario of the Yangtze River International Conference Center, a high-rise commercial building, is simulated with the Pyrosim program to get the necessary parameters under various fire scenarios and to calculate the available evacuation time T_ASET. At the same time, according to the complex functional zone of the commercial high-rise building and the distribution of people in different time periods, a reasonable evacuation strategy is developed and simulated by Pathfinder software. The results indicate that unorganized evacuation will lead individuals to take the erroneous evacuation route, resulting in a vast region of congestion; comprehensive consideration of the time staggering and the reasonable distribution of evacuation routes can significantly improve evacuation efficiency, and the T_RSET of night and working hours is 36.6%–55.3% and 49.9%–79.6% of unorganized evacuation, respectively. For the night fire, 60% of the people use elevator-refuge floor to evacuate is the optimal strategy; for the fire during working hours, half of the people on standard floors use the elevator to evacuate and people on multifunctional floors evacuate in four batches is the best plan. The results of this study can provide viable solutions and a foundation for analyzing the fire evacuation and safety of big commercial high-rise buildings.

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Keywords

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