TUNNEL FIRE SUPPRESSION SYSTEMS

Although accidents in road tunnels seem to occur less frequently than on the open road, several major tunnel accidents have occured in the last few years which has highlighted the need for an effective fire suppression method for this risk type. The main objective is to maintain risk within acceptable ranges with respect to the following:

• Fatality and injury
• Property loss
• Disruption operation
• In addition, Fire fighting systems installed shall help
• fire brigades task avoiding conditions in the tunnel
• to become untenable.

Since there is a lack of prescriptive design criteria in order to protect road tunnel, performance-based designs have been under development and debate. Different projects have been launched by Administrations with public funding in order to determine possible fire risk scenarios and to evaluate different fire fighting strategies. Water mist systems have been considered a suitable solution.

Low pressure solutions for tunnel protection can be considered the best technical solution to fulfil these requirements minimizing water and electrical power consumption.

Main benefits of this solution compared with high pressure water mist solutions are:

• Electrical power consumption is lot less than high
• pressure water mist solutions. This is a key point in
• many tunnels since they are located in remote areas where it’s very costly to provide enough electricity
• power to run ventilation and high pressure water mist solutions.
• Same pump system can be used for hydrants without
• the need to provide dedicated pump systems.

Contact LPG Fire Australia to discuss a low pressure watermist solution for your next tunnel project.