The effects of fatigue during deep metro evacuations and its implications on evacuation modelling tools
Abstract: The thesis purpose is to determine how people’s evacuation performance is affected by carrying weight while performing a stair-climbing motion. The fire safety engineering and physiology fields are merged to increase the knowledge regarding ascending evacuation. A laboratory experiment was conducted, in which participants performed three different sessions; during the first session, participants performed a sub-maximal test that would support the calculations for the prediction of the ideal step-rate estimating their VO2max by measuring their heart rate during a cardiovascular activity maintained approximately for 6 minutes; during sessions 2 and 3, participants performed a 5-minutes stair-climbing exercise, they did so under two modalities: 1) by not carrying an 8 kg backpack during one session, and 2) by carrying the 8 kg backpack during the remaining session. Measurements for oxygen uptake (VO2), heart rate (HR), and perceived exertion using the RPE Borg’s scale, where obtained during the stair-climbing experiment, and calculations for the energy expenditure (M) were then compared. A simple evacuation modelling case using the Mass-Motion software (MM) was conducted to obtain evacuation times; the model was configured in different manners, using 1) default parameters 2) walking speed distributions from available field experiments and 3) data from the current laboratory results. Using the findings during the laboratory experiment and considering people’s physiological aspects that can limit a stair-ascent motion during an evacuation, an additional scenario is described; this scenario includes a stair divided in 4 sections and separated by 3 resting planes, according with the average reduction-time requests by the participants during the “backpack” session.
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