Study on emergency ventilation mode for multisource fires in a typical interchange subway station

Abstract The fire protection design in a large-scale interchange station is always a great challenge. In this paper, a series of numerical simulations were conducted to investigate the performance of emergency ventilation modes for three potential multisource fire scenarios. The parameters that influence passengers’ evacuation were analyzed. The results demonstrated that unreasonable co-operation ventilation mode enhances the smoke propagation in other lines. The interaction of ventilation modes in different lines must be considered in practice. When the multisource fires occur on the same floor of both lines, the most effective scheme is to adopt the same ventilation mode in each line. When the multisource fires occur on different floors of both lines, it is difficult to maintain a balance of the exhaust capability in each line. The optimal ventilation modes were finally proposed for three fire scenarios based on the smoke discharge capability in the whole station.