A water curtain-based wayside protection system for tunnel fire safety

Tunnel fire safety plays a key role in the railway operations and many procedural and technological improvements have been realized in order to prevent and mitigate the fire risk. The fire prevention and protection procedures can be approached through two main different strategies: the deterministic/ prescriptive based approach and the performance-based approach. In the study presented in this paper, the possibility of application of the water curtain-based wayside fire protection system, as one of the auxiliary systems for improving and upgrading the fire safety in the railway tunnels for the smoke compartmentation, has been studied and analysed. A finite element-based dynamic simulation model has been developed in order to simulate different fire scenarios and to assess the water curtain-based fire protection system performances in terms of efficiency against the toxic smokes and gases propagation into the railway tunnel. Some preliminary numerical results have been presented