Studies On Performance-based Fire Evacuation Analytical Method In Business Buildings

The Prescriptive-based Fire Protection Analysis Approach has been adopted in our country for many years now, but its application is still facing substantial restrictions, and the safety of its practices is also in doubt. Serious conflagration accidents involving significant loss of life occurred in the recent years raised the impact of need for research on large business building fire. This thesis aims at the personnel's safe evacuation with Performance-based Fire Analytical Method under business building fire conditions in an effort to explore the important instruction meaning for Performance-based Fire Protection design, investigation and evaluation before the building's usage, and to provide reference for the promotion of the Performance-based Analytical Method application to the field of personnel's safe evacuation.In the thesis, the evacuation environment and characteristics of people involved in fire in business buildings are analyzed, and key problems during evacuating from business buildings in fire are put forward.A Performance-based Fire Analytical System that takes the safe evacuation as its final goal is set up. A method calculating the available evacuation time and the requested evacuation time is presented. The main factors in the adoption of equivalent evacuation speed in the network model are investigated, and the possibilities in using evacuation network in a spacious space are discussed.This thesis further studied main parameters in an evacuation process on the basis of on-the-spot observation and statistics, obtaining formulas to estimate the density of people, their moving speed and evacuating flux. Accordingly, the evacuation conditions are put into four groups: i.e. loose, limited, crowded and jammed, with corresponding parameters given.