ABSTRACT
Gali Batu depot is designed to provide administration, maintenance, operational and support facilities, and train stabling for the Downtown Line (DTL) railway transit system.
The depot includes main building (comprises the main workshop and office areas), locomotive workshop, central warehouse, stabling siding building, train wash building, ancillary buildings, sub-stations and other facilities as required to support the railway operations.
The local authority’s Fire Code [1] requires the total floor area of any compartment in a building or part of the building exceeding 5000m2 to be provided with smoke control system by natural or mechanical means. The main workshop consists of electric train corrective maintenance and overhaul facilities. The stabling siding is utilized for daily inspection and cleaning of electric trains. Both of these buildings have compartments exceeding 5000m2 and require smoke control system.
Performance-based analysis was carried out to study the effectiveness of the proposed natural smoke control system for main workshop and stabling siding buildings under various fire scenarios. This will result in cost saving due to the elimination of smoke exhaust and supply air fans.
This paper presents the performance-based approach to determine the available safe egress time (ASET) before the condition become untenable using Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) fire modeling software, FLUENT [7]. Comparing ASET with the calculated required safe evacuation time (RSET) [4] shows that the occupants are able to evacuate safety under a tenable environment.
