Experimental research of human evacuation in the case of a fire drill

The main purpose of this study is to analyze the human evacuation in the case of a fire drill by two different means: experimental research - “real fire drill” and numerical simulation - “virtual fire drill”. The analyzed building can house a large number of people and its inner atrium can facilitate the spread of smoke and hot gases in the case of a real fire. The evacuation drill was performed with about 50 students, located at the 2nd floor of the building, in two amphitheaters. They could evacuate themselves through two closed staircases to the ground floor of the building and then outside, through two exit doors. The second purpose of this study is to establish, for the given case, if the used computer software can simulate the crowd movement and compute the travel times in accordance with the experimental research. Another important subject is whether the computer software FDS+Evac - based on the CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) to simulate the crowd movement - can correctly identify the shortest escape path because one of the staircases, with its correspondent ground floor exit, is closer to the two analyzed amphitheaters. Following the numerical analysis, it was concluded that for the considered scenario, the differences between the “real fire drill” and the “virtual fire drill” are acceptable from an engineering point of view. FDS+Evac can simulate with high degree of credibility human movement in case of a fire drill.