Characterization of movement on vertical circulations

Abstract

A few years ago, it began in Portugal the development of buildings fire risk analysis model, named MARIE, composed by eleven partial models according to the factors taking influence on that risk, having the model for the building egress (MEE), constituted by the building description model (MDE) and the occupants’ movement model (MMO), already been completed. During MMO development, and due to the absence of national data allowing the characterization and quantification of people’s movement kinematic aspects on adverse environments boosting building evacuation, as stated on fire emergency situations, it was adopted Predtechenskii & Milinskii (P & M) mathematical relations. MEE is, nowadays, being improved, regarding both MDE and MMO. These improvements affecting MMO are related, in one hand, with the occupants’ behaviour, and, in the other hand, with the possibility of application to staircases of the mathematical relations of velocity and flow with density deduced by Predtechenskii & Milinskii. Therefore, several evacuation drills performed at the University of Coimbra Campus were filmed and analysed, where 321 people were involved, in order to obtain the expressions describing the movement in stairs, and later comparing them with P & M’s expressions.