Upgrade of a transverse ventilation system in a bi-directional tunnel

The Karavanke tunnel forms an important link between Slovenia and Austria. The almost 8 km long tunnel is operated with bi-directional traffic and does not have dedicated escape routes. Moreover, the ventilation in case of fire does not satisfy requirements of the EU Directive 2004/54/EC that specifies the minimum requirements for tunnels in the trans-European road network. The paper present results of the research conducted regarding the possibility of upgrade the existing system in order to reach the required level of safety at lower costs possible. It is shown that with simple but novel adaptations of the ventilation system, a sizeable increase in the overall level of safety can be achieved. The methodology applied is a combination of a simple pipe model for tunnel ventilation and for detailed fluid dynamics analysis the CFD model is used. The existing ventilation system that in fire ventilation extracts smoke from a single duct is replaced with the smoke extraction from both ducts applying four axial fans. The analysis is focused on air/smoke flow through the vents and ducts and on pressure drops calculated over the length of the ventilation duct and its influence on the total flow. The change of the flow condition also has influence on ventilation fan operation point that is investigated in the paper as well