WP 1

Work Package Leader:

PREVENTION, DETECTION AND MONITORING

 Mrs. Ilse Roelants
(Traficon)

This workpackage will assess monitoring and detection systems installed at present, assess if improvements to those systems could be made, evaluate new methods and techniques for determining incidents and fires inside and outside tunnels. To ensure that the ultimate results of UPTUN are achieved, it will be necessary to make a detailed database of all road and rail tunnels in Europe, detailing the type of tunnels in each country, what type of detection systems are in place, whether any suppression systems are installed, details of recent incidents. This database will then be used to analyse these recent incidents and to assess if tunnels that have better monitoring and detection systems achieved a quicker response to an incident, thus reducing the impact of an incident and minimising the economic impact in surrounding areas.

 

Technical tasks
Objectives
1.1
Categorisation and listing of European tunnels.
To categorise European tunnels on the basis of a scientific distinction.
1.2
Causes and prevention of accidents and fire.

To identify probabilities of incidents potentially leading to fires and propose, investigate and promote methods to reduce these.

1.3

Existing Detection and monitoring systems.

To list potential suitable existing detection and monitoring techniques and to investigate reliability of existing systems.

1.4

Exploration of alternative or new technology for detection of moving fires, detection of fires outside tunnels, detection of the migration of fires.

To develop innovative measures to detect the fire load and growth.

1.5

Implementation of proposed solutions and prototypes.

Small-scale tests will be performed to evaluate the new systems with regard to reliability, accuracy, fire resistance, etc. Modifications to existing detection and monitoring systems will be made to assess any expected improvements.