A Study on Applying Phenol Foam Insulation Material as Pipe Lagging Material

During a fire, the major cause of casualties is the toxic gas produced from combustible interior and exterior materials. Increasing the time for occupant evacuation by reducing toxic gas is the most effective way of reducing casualties. Many casualties occurred in recent fires at the Jecheon Sports Center, Miryang Sejong Hospital, and Icheon Distribution Center. The commonality is that the toxic gas produced from combustible interior and exterior materials was the major cause of the casualties. In this study, phenol foam insulation material was considered as an alternative pipe lagging material, owing to its limited combustibility and non-production of toxic gas, to determine a method for removing the toxic gas generated from the combustion of pipe lagging material. Phenol foam insulation material is often used as the insulation material for building exteriors owing to its excellent insulation performance. Moreover, it has the advantage of being an environment-friendly product with zero ozone layer destruction coefficient and low harmful substance emissions. The incombustibility of phenol foam insulation material was verified through the Standard Performance Test of the Limited Combustible Material (Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport Notice No. 2020-1053). Further, an alternative is to be proposed if a pipe lagging material with inadequate incombustibility is used in the site even though a tested pipe lagging material with limited combustibility is available.

Study on evacuation simulation under crowd-diversion condition

With the increasing number of domestic buildings, the importance of safety evacuation in case of fire in the buildings has been aware. Occupants in a building will crowd at exit(s) when they evacuate in disasters. The content of this study includes the following: (1) to conduct a literature review on severe stampedes in history, identifying the number of casualties, and to explore existing research on crowd evacuation; (2) to examine the applicability of software packages EXODUS and Unity for simulating occupant evacuation using them for simulations under identical conditions; and (3) to construct simulated evacuation environments using Unity and perform simulations with different combinations of occupant number, space size, exit size, and flow diverter size. The simulation results found that placing a flow diverter in front of the exit could reduce the evacuation time effectively. The best result was observed when the width of the door is close to the width of the flow diverter; it can reduce the evacuation time by about 25%. When more than 60 people were emptying through an exit below 120 cm width, the blocking happened regardless of whether a flow diverter was placed.