Seguridad en túneles: pruebas de humo y directiva europea

El segundo bloque del III Congreso ITS Euskadi se centraba en los sistemas inteligentes de transporte (ITS, Intelligent Transport Systems) aplicados a la seguridad. Fernando Morente, asesor técnico de Ignis Control hacía un resumen de la directiva europea de requisitos mínimos de seguridad en túneles (European Directive 2004/54/CE). En el caso concreto de incendios, la prioridad es la evacuación aunque Morente hacía hincapié en el tratamiento del humo de cara a conseguir estabilizarlo en condiciones adecuadas para la supervivencia.

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:: Resumen de la ponencia

The European Directive 2004/54/CE about minimum safety requirements in road tunnels, establishes the obligation of execute drills and trials, regularly, to validate the guidelines of action in case of fire; but not establish the specific content of this drills to achieve the aim.

In case of fire inside a road tunnel, the first objective consists of make the egress easier to the people close to the place of the fire through the existing evacuation routes, by the confinement of the smoke, during a sufficient time, that it allows to maintain compatible environmental conditions with the life. Next, start the extraction of the smoke.

In order to stop the effects of the smoke, being important the design of the exhaust system fan, it is much more the definition of exhaust guidelines. It receives the name of exhaust guidelines, the sequential strategy of operation on the exhaust system fan that responds and solves a certain fire situation.

By the several variables that influence in a fire, it is very difficult to know the real behaviour in a fire scenario. The aim of the fire test in a tunnel is the verification of the security against fire, regarding smoke control in the tunnel, by carrying out real tests that they allow to validate exhaust guidelines of the exhaust fan system against these fire scenes.

The non destructive hot smoke test in road tunnels according to the European Directive 2004/54/CE developed by Ignis Control is able to represent the conditions of smoke of an equivalent real fire. The temperature of hot gases causes that the difference of densities between these gases and the surrounding air in the tunnel due to stratify and reproduces the movements of the smoke in a real fire. The clean gases produced in this test guarantee the essential property of the test: clean and non destructive.

:: Ponencia