Research on Fire Safety Evacuation in a University Library in Nanjing

To research the fire peril arrival time and evacuation situation when fire extinguishing system fails, in this work Pyrosim and Pathfinder software were used to; simulate the spread of smoke and human evacuation in a university library in Nanjing during fires. Through the comparative analysis of the temperature, smoke layer height, the visibility, CO concentration and FED value, the simulation results show that, the risk time of the library is 280s, on the fire scale of 4MW; the risk time of reading room is 125s, on the fire scale of 8MW. The evacuation simulation results indicate that the evacuation time of the entire library and reading room is 411s and 165s respectively. Finally, the fire safety of the library is evaluated by comparing the risk time and evacuation time. It is concluded that the exit of each layer is the first to reach the dangerous state; the direction of the hazardous area is also the direction of safe evacuation. The risk time of the library and the reading room, is the time when the height of smoke down to 2m. Therefore, the staff activity height, smoke volume and detection alarm and other factors, should be considered in the system design of smoke control.