There are a broad range of infrastructure sensing applications in transportation that are not being met. Many of these vital assets are aging or not adequately monitored with the potential for catastrophic failure. As examples, the bridge failure in Minneapolis, Minnesota was due to a structural failure. Fire safety problems, with recent life-loss fires, in road tunnels are challenging due to s...

Ž . Plume clouds resulting from wildland fires pyrocumulus sometimes produce lightning discharges to ground. These discharges were found to carry positive charge to ground exclusively in several cases. Emission of space charge was observed from woody materials burned in the presence of an external electric field. Measurements done in a large wind tunnel for this study confirm and extend measure...

Locomotion emerges from effective interactions of an individual with its environment. Principles of biological terrestrial locomotion have been discovered on unconfined vertical and horizontal substrates. However, a diversity of organisms construct, inhabit, and move within confined spaces. Such animals are faced with locomotor challenges including limited limb range of motion, crowding, and vi...

A review concerning road tunnel fire safety and risk is presented. In particular different perspectives and methods on safety and risk are discussed. Road tunnel fire safety usually involves high uncertainty and high-stakes decisions. Thus, a wider group of stakeholders and different types of knowledge should be included in the fire safety analysis and evaluation, than what is required by techn...

Fire represents a very complex phenomenon, as the severity of the consequences associated with its evolution depends not only on the fire source itself, but also on the configuration of the system in which it develops, that is whether the source term is placed in an unconfined environment or it is confined in a room or in an elongated space such as a tunnel, either empty or filled with vehicles...

Fires caused by cables occur frequently in mines, which endanger the safety of workers. To explore characteristics a multilayer cable fire mine tunnel, simulations were carried out using Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS). The influence tray spacing, ignition position, and tunnel ventilation speed on studied. results showed that these factors change amount contact between air, heat accumulation, tra...

In this study, fire in a short 2-lane single-directional road tunnel with two different traffic situations is considered and the impact of spread of fire and smoke on people evacuation is investigated. The FDS+Evac system used comprises of FDS (Fire Dynamics Simulator), an advanced CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) fire field model supplemented by agent-based FDS evacuation model, Evac. Evac i...