A fire in a tunnel can be a devastating and highly undesirable event if it is not addressed at the early stages of its development. This is particularly true for fires involving a heavy goods vehicle carrying combustibles with high calorific content. Heat, soot and toxic combustibles can be produced very rapidly and therefore significantly increase the difficulty for escape, rescue and fire-fighting activities. A series of large-scale fire tests for road tunnel application was conducted at the TST tunnel facility in Spain in March 2012. The aims of this fire tests programme were to investigate the magnitude of the heat release rate generated with and without a low-pressure deluge fire suppression system; the effects of other measures in the presence of a fire suppression system such as reducing the longitudinal flow velocity; and to acquire information on the appropriate design parameters (e.g. nozzle type, discharge density and activation time) to adopt, based on the most probable fuel load used in the Singapore road tunnels. In order to ensure repeatability, simulated heavy goods vehicles consisting of 228 pallets with 48 plastic pallets (20% by volume) and 180 wooden pallets (80% by volume) were used in all fire tests. A longitudinal air velocity of 3 m/s was applied in the tunnel fire tests.
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