Experimental studies on open type cabin fire

Abstract

The “cabin” concept has been used widely for fire safety in big public transport terminals not fully protected by sprinkler nor smoke exhaust system in the Far East for the past 20 years. There, only the areas with a higher fire risk, such as retail shops, are protected. The big terminals are used to be crowded, and so there are concerns on whether the cabin design can provide adequate fire protection in such big halls, and whether the design will give problems in firefighting. Consequently, additional fire safety provisions such as long-throw sprinkler had been installed in areas with higher fire risk. Smoke exhaust system have to be added to the large hall. 

In the new edition of fire safety provisions required for railway systems, the open type of cabin is specified. No in-depth study supported by systematic experiments on how the fire can be limited to 2 MW reported in the literature. On the other hand, preliminary experimental studies on cabin with sprinkler and smoke exhaust carried out indicated that there are many concerns.

In this paper, five tests on cabin fire carried out in a big burning hall at the State Key Laboratory of Fire Science, University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) will be taken out to demonstrate the problems associated with such open type cabins. Problems in big halls without fully covered by smoke exhaust system had been demonstrated clearly in an airport terminal fire in 1998. It took a long time for firefighters to locate the fire source in that small fire at the airport terminal. The fire safety must be upgraded by appropriate hardware engineering systems and software safety management to reduce the chance of having big fire, and facilitate firefighting.