Evacuation Conditions In A Subway Stations With Platform Screen Doors

Safety concerns are playing a determinant role in the design of infrastructures, such as subway stations. Therefore, new solutions are being studied and analyzed in order to improve the global safety level. Among these solutions, platform screen doors (PSD) are having a key role, since their use offers important advantages, especially when it comes to facing an emergency situation involving a fire in a subway carriage. As a consequence of the placement of PSD in subway stations, the ventilation strategy must be adapted, because if there is a fire inside a subway carriage, part of the smoke can more easily be isolated from the passengers in the platform.

Thus, two possible scenarios can be assessed depending on the existence or not of PSD:

• Without PSD: smoke can’t be isolated and, thus, it can spread all along the platform, being mostly extracted through the tunnel by a ventilation shaft.
• With PSD: part of the smoke can be isolated from the passengers on the platform and it is extracted by one of the tunnel ventilation shafts. The remaining part is extracted by the station exhaust system.

The shape of the station has also its relevancy in terms of safety, mainly because in a fire event, the buoyancy force makes smoke head toward certain places where the evacuation routes may be placed.

The aim of the present document is to carry out a comparison between both situations in terms of evacuation conditions during a fire event. This way, it is possible to quantify and compare visibility, temperature, CO concentration and other variables in the evacuation routes.