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Abstract The ceiling structure in a long-narrow space has a significant impact on the thickness of the fire smoke layer. This paper mainly studies the influence of the height of the ceiling structure on the thickness of the smoke layer before the ceiling structure. Firstly, a theoretical analysis is conducted on the relationship between the critical thickness that affects the smoke flow state and the smoke layer thickness directly below the ceiling structure, and a formula for calculating the smoke layer thickness under gradient flow conditions is derived. Then a small-scale experimental platform was built to study the deviation of actual fire smoke relative to theoretical calculations. Experimental results show that due to the smoke cannot maintain gradient flow when crossing the ceiling structure, there is difference with theoretical calculations in the smoke layer thickness directly below the ceiling structure and some distance before the ceiling structure (which may be of greater concern for personnel evacuation). The gradient flow coefficient and thickness coefficient are defined to represent the above differences. After analysis, it was found that the gradient flow coefficient and thickness coefficient showed different linear variation patterns when the height of the ceiling structure was longer than 35 cm or shorter than 30 cm. Through numerical analysis, this study suggests that the main reason for the change in this linear pattern is whether the potential energy conversed from kinetic energy of the thin layer close to the ceiling structure can directly make the smoke to cross the ceiling structure. The research conclusions of this paper can assist in the engineering design of building smoke control and personnel evacuation.

In order to study the influence of wind direction on fire spread on building facades, a three-dimensional model of a high-rise building was built with PyroSim software. Numerical simulations were conducted with five wind directions (0°, 45°, 90°, 135° and 180°) and a reference wind speed of 3 m/s. The results show that the fire spread on the building facade was most significant on the leeward side, followed by the upwind condition. The horizontal spread of fire was promoted by crosswinds at 45°, 90° and 135°, while its vertical spread was inhibited. Among these, the inhibitory effect of the 45° crosswind was the greatest. The fire spread area under the leeward condition was the greatest at approximately 341.3 m2, accounting for 17.1% of the facade, and the vertical spread velocity under the condition of no wind was the fastest at 0.075 m/s. In this study, the motion characteristics of facade fire spread under different wind directions were determined, providing supporting evidence to enhance fire safety prevention and control measures in high-rise buildings.

In the context of a fire emergency, safe and efficient exits are of paramount importance for pedestrian evacuation. The recent rapid development in the construction industry has rendered exit structures more diverse and complex. However, little attention has been paid to the influence of exit structures on the efficiency of crowd evacuation processes. In this paper, a tentative experiment was designed to preliminarily reveal the effects of five exit structures (Exit 1, Exit 2, Exit 4, Exit 5, and Exit 3 as examples for comparison) on crowd evacuation. Exit 1 has door leaves opening outward. Exit 2 has door leaves opening inward. Exit 3 has no leaves. Exit 4 consists of double-layer exit doors with the doors opening outward. Exit 5 comprises double-layer exit doors with the doors opening both sides outwards Subsequently, according to the properties of this experiment, a social force-based simulation model was established using the AnyLogic software 8.8.4. By changing the exit width and the crowd density, data such as evacuation time, flow rate, crowd density, and time delay were investigated in detail. The results revealed a notable variation in the evacuation efficiency depending on the deign of the exit. The respective flow rates for Exits 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 were 0.66 people/(m·s), 0.77 people/(m·s), 0.80 people/(m·s), 0.71 people/(m·s), and 0.66 people/(m·s). Although Exit 3 excelled in terms of evacuation efficiency, it is not directly applicable to real architectural structures. Therefore, Exit 2 emerged as a highly promising solution in terms of flow rate and population control in the exit area, underscoring the effectiveness and practicality of its structural design. It is prospective that the results of this study can offer engineering and technical professionals valuable references and guidance concerning the design of exit structures.

In the face of fire in buildings, people need to quickly plan their escape routes. Intelligent optimization algorithms can achieve this goal, including the sparrow search algorithm (SSA). Despite the powerful search ability of the SSA, there are still some areas that need improvements. Aiming at the problem that the sparrow search algorithm reduces population diversity and is easy to fall into local optimum when solving the optimal solution of the objective function, a hybrid improved sparrow search algorithm is proposed. First, logistic-tent mapping is used to initialize the population and enhance diversity in the population. Also, an adaptive period factor is introduced into the producer’s update position equation. Then, the Lévy flight is introduced to the position of the participant to improve the optimization ability of the algorithm. Finally, the adaptive disturbance strategy is adopted for excellent individuals to strengthen the ability of the algorithm to jump out of the local optimum in the later stage. In order to prove the improvement of the optimization ability of the improved algorithm, the improved sparrow algorithm is applied to five kinds of maps for evacuation path planning and compared with the simulation results of other intelligent algorithms. The ultimate simulation results show that the optimization algorithm proposed in this paper has better performance in path length, path smoothness, and algorithm convergence, showing better optimization performance.

Fire accidents due to oil-immersed transformers seriously threaten the safe operation of power systems. In this paper, the similarity principle was used to design a high-pressure water mist fire-extinguishing test platform for a small-scale transformer fire, and the design method achieved a good fire extinguishing effect. The results indicate that a deflagration phenomenon, lasting about 2–4 s, could be observed after activating the high-pressure water mist system; the flame temperature rose rapidly at first, then dropped sharply, and finally cooled to the indoor temperature. The nozzle’s flow rate in this system has a significant impact on the fire extinguishing time. Meanwhile, the adjustment of the upper nozzle height also influenced the fire suppression effectiveness of the system, where a height of 1800 mm achieved the best performance compared to the others. In addition, the ambient wind speed is a very unfavorable factor for transformer fire suppression, where the fire extinguishing efficiency decreases rapidly with the increase in wind speed. Therefore, under low wind speed conditions, the high-pressure water mist system has great advantages in the fire suppression of outdoor oil-immersed transformers, and the above research results can provide a reference for the optimization design of this system.

In order to cope with limited land availability and the increasing urban population, more high-rise buildings are being built throughout cities, but this has also led to new challenges in the emergency evacuation of people. Therefore, we conducted an evacuation experiment of a group of people in the stairwells of high-rise buildings to explore the movement law of groups in stairwells. The experiment had 18 scenes, including the evacuation movement of an independent group and the crowd evacuation movement of different groups. Analyzing the independent groups’ movement showed that regardless of the type of group, the average speed of the crowd was more than 1.2 m/s, which was longer than that of previous studies. The more constraints in the evacuation process, the smaller the speed difference between males and females. Group cohesion was mostly concentrated at about 1 s. Moreover, group velocity and cohesion were found to have no significant correlation in stairwell movement. Analyzing the crowd evacuation time of eight different scenes showed that it took longer for crowds bearing weight to evacuate than those not bearing weight. According to the spatiotemporal evolution of crowd evacuation in stairwells, the crowd moves intermittently in the evacuation process, especially in the early and middle stages of evacuation, and the influence of group factors on this process was not obvious. Regardless of the kind of scene or stairwell, the number of pedestrians generally first increased and then decreased to a significantly low value, and the number of pedestrians reached about 30 in the scenario of people without any load. Additionally, the speed of the pedestrians entering the stairwell in the back of the group was not faster than that of the pedestrians in the front, which showed that pedestrians rarely engaged in overtaking behavior. The research results of this paper not only enrich evacuation research but also provide support for the design of high-rise stairs.

Satellite remote sensing provides global observations of the Earth’s surface and provides useful information for monitoring smoke plumes emitted from forest fires. The aim of this study is to automatically separate smoke plumes from the background by analyzing the MODIS data. An identification algorithm was improved based on the spectral analysis among the smoke, cloud and underlying surface. In order to get satisfactory results, a multi-threshold method is used for extracting training sample sets to train back-propagation neural network (BPNN) classification for merging the smoke detection algorithm. The MODIS data from three forest fires were used to develop the algorithm and get parameter values. These fires occurred in (i) China on 16 October 2004, (ii) Northeast Asia on 29 April 2009 and (iii) Russia on 29 July 2010 in different seasons. Then, the data from four other fires were used to validate the algorithm. Results indicated that the algorithm captured both thick smoke and thin dispersed smoke over land, as well as the mixed pixels of smoke over the ocean. These results could provide valuable information concerning forest fire location, fire spreading and so on.

Reducing casualties and property losses through effective evacuation route planning has been a key focus for researchers in recent years. As part of this effort, an enhanced sparrow search algorithm (MSSA) was proposed. Firstly, the Golden Sine algorithm and a nonlinear weight factor optimization strategy were added in the discoverer position update stage of the SSA algorithm. Secondly, the Cauchy-Gaussian perturbation was applied to the optimal position of the SSA algorithm to improve its ability to jump out of local optima. Finally, the local search mechanism based on the mountain climbing method was incorporated into the local search stage of the SSA algorithm, improving its local search ability. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, the Whale Algorithm, Gray Wolf Algorithm, Improved Gray Wolf Algorithm, Sparrow Search Algorithm, and MSSA Algorithm were employed to solve various test functions. The accuracy and convergence speed of each algorithm were then compared and analyzed. The results indicate that the MSSA algorithm has superior solving ability and stability compared to other algorithms. To further validate the enhanced algorithm's capabilities for path planning, evacuation experiments were conducted using different maps featuring various obstacle types. Additionally, a multi-exit evacuation scenario was constructed according to the actual building environment of a teaching building. Both the sparrow search algorithm and MSSA algorithm were employed in the simulation experiment for multi-exit evacuation path planning. The findings demonstrate that the MSSA algorithm outperforms the comparison algorithm, showcasing its greater advantages and higher application potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]