Description
A major element of any roadway overbuild, tunnel or enclosed vehicular facility is the ventilation facility or system, which are designed to control smoke and hot gases from a fire to facilitate evacuation of patrons to a point of safety. Fire-life safety standards such as NFPA 130 and NFPA 502 establish minimum design criteria but also allow the designer to use a performance-based design to achieve the overall goal of providing a tenable path of egress.
The design of an overbuild project over existing roadways aimed to maximize decarbonization benefits without compromising fire-life safety. This approach will minimize the use of mechanical ventilation while still achieving the goals of tenability for evacuating patrons by utilizing natural ventilation openings and vertical jet fan shafts. This paper presents a methodology utilizing Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and egress analyses to evaluate the suitability of using a combination of natural ventilation openings and ventilation shafts equipped with vertically mounted jet fans to demonstrate tenability during a fire scenario requiring patron evacuation. Developed during an ongoing roadway project, this approach will quantify the potential embodied carbon and operational carbon through the lens of a sustainability framework.