Real scale tunnel fire: experimental test inside the Morgex tunnel – autostrada A5

The severe fires in Europe, such as those of the Mont Blanc, Gotthard and Tauern tunnels, have clearly displayed the dramatic urgency of adapting the road and rail tunnels to higher safety standards. From 2004 the European directive 2004/54/EC required risk analysis for existing tunnels that are considered below the minimum safety standards. Those Risk analysis procedures have to develop and combine proper models to calculate the flux of danger between the sources and the targets (people, infrastructure and environment), so a key role is nowadays played by computer simulations and fire models. From 2011 the Laboratorio Mobilità e Trasporti and Dipartimento CMIC (Chimica, Materiali Ingegneria Chimica) of the Politecnico di Milano cooperate to improve the knowledge on tunnel fires, using both experimental activity and theoretical tools such as the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) [1]. This code is one of the leading Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) models for fire modeling, widely used in the field of fire protection engineering. After the first real event test in the Gran San Bernardo Tunnel, a second real-scale test (15 MW) has been conducted by the team in July 2012 in the Morgex Tunnel, which allowed to collect important measurements and information useful for validating and improving the CFD codes, to obtain a better design of tunnels and their safety systems, to perform risk analysis and to evaluate the best strategies for intervention of rescue teams. The test saw the fundamental cooperation of Corpo Valdostano Vigili del Fuoco and RAV Autostrade SpA.