ORPHEUS - Fire Safety in the Underground
February 2015 saw the start of the ORPHEUS project, which is being funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) for 36 months. The consortium is coordinated by JSC and consists of 13 partners: Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung, IBIT, Imtech, Institut für Industrieaerodynamik, Ruhr-Universität Bochum and the associated partners Berliner Feuerwehr, Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe, Deutsche Bahn, Hekatron, Karstadt, NVIDIA, and Team HF. The project kick-off meeting will take place at Jülich on 12 March.
The objective is the optimization of smoke management and evacuation strategies in underground train stations. This covers technical as well as interorganizational aspects.
The first of the three main parts consists of validation experiments in an operational metro station. Outside of operating hours, real fire experiments will be carried out in a fully monitored station in Berlin. The data obtained (e.g. velocity, temperature, and tracer gas concentrations) will be used to validate CFD models. The second part aims to investigate novel smoke management systems and evacuation aspects. Small-scale physical experiments and numerical simulations of smoke and heat propagation in underground stations will form the basis for the project studies. In this context, JSC will develop new mesh-adaptive methods to focus computational effort on numerically relevant subdomains of extensive buildings. Additionally, the pedestrian simulation model JuPedSim, developed in-house at JSC, will be expanded to include psychological decision models and the capability to be coupled to fire simulation models. The third part covers the interaction between the operators, emergency services, and third parties (e.g. shops). Analysis of past events and interviews with those involved will allow a communication pattern analysis (e.g. with respect to warnings and emergency calls). In this regard, JSC's contribution is a real-time smoke propagation prognosis model which may be used by the emergency services. The project website will soon be available at http://www.orpheus-projekt.de.
(Contact: Dr. Lukas Arnold, l.arnold@fz-juelich.de)
JSC News, 10 March 2015