Authors: R. Giordano, N. Rhodes
Fifth International Conference on Safety in Road and Rail Tunnels, Marseille, France, 2003
Abstract
The Park Avenue railroad tunnel begins at New York City’s Grand Central Terminal and running from just below grade to about 30 ft below the surface, north for a distance of two miles, terminates at the 97th St. Portal in Uptown Manhattan. Originally constructed as an open depression in 1834, it was later covered in various stages during the late 1800’s to the early 1900’s creating the present day tunnel. Accordingly, the four-track tunnel has only natural ventilation provided by numerous openings connected to street level. The geometry of the tunnel is complicated by the division of the tunnel into three sections, having a two-track center section flanked by single-track outer sections and isolated by dividing walls that are perforated with shaft-like cross-connections or arched apertures.
The challenge in the design of a ventilation system to improve the safety of the tunnel in the event of a fire incident involved considerable space constraints and the unusual, one hundred year old geometry. The options studied included an assessment of passive and mechanical ventilation systems. Onedimensional techniques were used to establish boundary conditions for the more detailed three-dimensional
Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analyses. CFD was used to focus in on critical locations within the tunnel. The aim of this paper is to document the smoke behavior for a range of fire incidents from the one and three-dimensional coupled analyses and study options to increase the level of safety for railroad commuters and train operators through mechanical ventilation.
