The complete evacuation of hospital facilities is always a difficult and complex process. It has always been considered a last resort during any kind of threat. In recent years, the increasing number of manmade and natural disasters has generated a considerable interest in hospital evacuation issues, but very few studies have addressed this problem. The purpose of this study is to develop design strategies for hospital facilities to support the complete evacuation process. The following three objectives are considered for fulfilling the requirements of the study: (a) identify the disaster threats for hospital buildings that drive the need for complete evacuation, (b) develop an understanding of the consequences and complexities of hospital evacuation, and (c) form the design strategies based on threat analysis, case-studies and experts’ reviews. For interpretation purposes, this study use the qualitative research with casebased reasoning approach to collect, summarize, and evaluate the recorded data. The study is only focused on design considerations of some specific parameters for hospital building evacuation design. This study provides a comprehensive assessment of bestsuited design strategies that could be adopted by healthcare architects or planners in order to develop their designs in ways that improve the hospital building evacuation process.

The focus of this thesis is to estimate evacuation vulnerability in a non-specific evacuation context. Three measures were calculated to evaluate the evacuation vulnerability of locations within Frontenac County, Ontario: population/capacity ratios, link removal analysis and the composite vulnerability measure. By utilizing both population/capacity ratios, as typified by Cova and Church (1997), and link removal analysis, a composite estimate of vulnerability can be determined. The composite vulnerability measure integrates the population/capacity ratios and the link removal analysis to examine the effect of link unavailability on evacuation difficulty. Subsequently, a linear regression analysis is utilized to estimate these complex measures incorporating simple variables. These include population, road and dead-end densities. The advantage of a regression analysis is that it can be used in any situation and for any given area. This research demonstrates that evacuation vulnerability of a network is of key importance for identifying which parts of a populated area may need plans put into place before the necessity of an evacuation occurs. Certain road configurations are shown to be more vulnerable than others, particularly neighbourhoods with a limited number of exits. Overall, the composite vulnerability measure identifies areas of increased and decreased vulnerability throughout Frontenac County. This regression analysis demonstrates a spatial pattern of calculated vulnerability values similar to those predicted based on the regression equation. Importantly, the regression analysis has demonstrated that it might be used to identify vulnerable areas in a simpler manner. / Thesis (Master, Geography) -- Queen's University, 2008-09-17 10:10:20.018

Tall buildings are becoming more common in the modern built environment and the method of evacuating or moving to a place of safety using the stairs is still the primary means of egress. Typically designers use tools such as computer models and hand calculations to predict the time taken for occupants to evacuate to an exit or place of safety. However, increasing trends of obesity, age and a sedentary lifestyle is raising questions about the accuracy of some of the tools. As the tools are based on case study data carried out in the 1980’s. This research compares evacuation performance of case study buildings to the predictions by Pauls’ simplified hand calculation and the EvacuatioNZ computer model. The comparison uses four multi-storey buildings from the case study data, ranging from 11 to 27 stories high. The research will also investigate the effect of how the building is represented in EvacuatioNZ on the performance of the prediction and make recommendations in best practice for further work. Results from the comparisons shows EvacuatioNZ is within 15% for total egress time of the case study data in six out of eight of the stairs. The average difference of EvacuatioNZ to the case study is 8.6%. Further comparisons of exit flow rate and descent speed show EvacuatioNZ is within 10% of the case study data in five out of eight of the stairs. Paul’s simplified hand calculation predicts a total egress time which is 6% to 38% shorter than the case study data. Modifying the equation to equalise stair entry delay improves the prediction to a difference of 0.9% to 31%. The modified equation is within 10% in five out of eight stairs. The comparisons for EvacuatioNZ indicate predictions which are generally with 10-15%. However individual performance is not investigated and this area should be fully investigated to answer concerns about contemporary occupants and their ability to descend multiple flights of stairs. Further work should include a larger range of data, particularly exploring building height and population. Given the recommendations are followed and more data becomes available for further work to support this research; EvacuatioNZ could be used as a tool for predicting evacuations in multi-storey buildings. Pauls’ hand calculation is not recommended for predictions of multi-storey evacuations without a safety factor. Differences between the prediction and case study result were improved with a modification of the equation to account for the case study stair entry times.

Thesis (M.S.)--Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1990. / Vita. Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 136-137). Also available via the Internet.

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The number of devices connected to the Internet will increase exponentially by 2020, which is smoothly migrating the Internet from an Internet of people towards an Internet of Things (IoT). These devices can communicate with each other and exchange information forming a wide Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). WSNs are composed mainly of a large number of small devices that run on batteries, which makes the energy limited. Therefore, it is essential to use an energy efficient routing protocol for WSNs that are scalable and robust in terms of energy consumption and lifetime. Using routing protocols that are based on clustering can be used to solve energy problems. Cluster-based routing protocols provide an efficient approach to reduce the energy consumption of sensor nodes and maximize the network lifetime of WSNs. In this thesis, a single hop cluster-based network layer routing protocol, referred to as HRHP, is designed. It applies centralized and deterministic approaches for the selection of cluster heads, in relation to offer an improved network lifetime for large-scaled and dense WSN deployments. The deterministic approach for selecting CHs is based on the positive selection mechanism in the human thymus cells (T-cells). HRHP was tested over six different scenarios with BS position outer the sensing area, it achieved a maximum average of 78% in terms of life time. To further reduce energy consumption in WSN, a multi-hop algorithm, referred to as MLHP, is proposed for prolonging the lifetime of WSN. In this algorithm, the sensing area is divided into three levels to reduce the communication cost by reducing the transmission distances for both inter-cluster and intra-cluster communication. MLHP was tested over fourteen cases with different heterogeneity factors and area sizes and achieved a maximum of 80% improvement in terms of life time. Finally, a real-time and autonomous emergency evacuation approach is proposed, referred to as ARTC-WSN, which integrates cloud computing with WSN in order to improve evacuation accuracy and efficiency for smart buildings. The approach is designed to perform localized, autonomous navigation by calculating the best evacuation paths in a distributed manner using two types of sensor nodes (SNs), a sensing node and a decision node. ARTC-WSN was tested in five scenarios with different hazard intensity, occupation ratio and exit availability over three different areas of evacuation and achieved an average of 98% survival ratio for different cases.

A fire in road tunnel can be dangerous and lead to serious consequences if not addressed appropriately. In a tunnel fire incident, creating a smoke free path for motorist evacuation and facilitating fire fighters to access the fire is critical for fire and rescue operations. A means of achieving this is to use ventilation fans to blow sufficient air down the tunnel ensuring no back-layering of smoke occurs upstream of the fire. The airflow necessary for such operation is known as the critical velocity which is a function of a number of factors includes; heat release rate, tunnel geometry, tunnel gradient etc. Among these parameters, the heat release rate is the most difficult to identify as this value is dependent on the types of vehicles, number of vehicles involved, the type of cargo and the quantity of cargo carried by these vehicles. There are also other factors such as the influence of ventilation condition, tunnel geometry and the use of legislation (to restrict hazardous vehicles entering in tunnel) that could affect the heat release rate in a tunnel fire. The number of possible fire scenarios is numerous. Based on current practise, fire size selection for most tunnel ventilation design often references various guidelines such as NFPA 502, BD78/99 or the PIARC technical committee report. The heat release rate, particularly for goods vehicle recommended by the guidelines varies from 20 to 30 MW. However, recent fire tests conducted in the Runehamar tunnel experiments indicate a higher heat release rate. These experiments suggest that heat release rate guidelines for goods vehicles might be underestimated. An ideal means to estimate the heat release rate in the tunnel is to use the oxygen consumption calorimetry technique. However, this approach is generally expensive, logistically complicated to perform and it is often not feasible to conduct such tests for a tunnel project at the initial design stage simply because the structure and systems are not ready for such activities. This research thesis presents an approach to establish a design fire in a road tunnel particularly the peak heat release rate for emergency tunnel ventilation system design. The analysis consists of two stages; stage one involves the use of a probabilistic approach (risk analysis) to identify the potential cause and type of vehicle which could result in a tunnel fire. Findings from the risk analysis are used in stage two in which Computational Fluid II Dynamics (CDF) modelling is used to establish the heat release rate in the tunnel considering factors such as fuel load, ventilation condition, tunnel geometry and ignition location. The Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS 4.0.7), a CFD model of fire-driven fluid flow is used for the analysis and an urban road tunnel project in Singapore is used to illustrate this methodology. Other topic related to this research work includes the reconstruction for the Runehamar tunnel fire test using numerical approach to calibrate the FDS simulation model. The used of Probabilistic Bayesian approach and CFD approach using FDS to estimate the heat release rate in the tunnel is also investigated in this thesis. The effect of vehicle fire spread in road tunnel and numerical simulation of road tunnel fires using parallel processing is presented. Preliminary work in using FDS5 for tunnel simulation work is discussed as part of the research work in this project.

Thesis (M.S.)--Ball State University, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on June 07, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 63-67).

published_or_final_version / Architecture / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy