Citation

Ono R, Valentim MV, Vittorino F. Fire Mater. 2021; 45(4): 508-528.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2021, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1002/fam.2833

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

A method to collect the times and travel routes in predefined sections of stairs is presented, in order to obtain walking velocities of children. Twenty-seven possible travel paths on landings and nine possible travel paths on flights are proposed and the equations developed to calculate them are presented. Experiments were carried out where data were not collected from fire drills, as usually are, but from the movement of unimpeded individuals descending stairs using this method. The technique used to collect data was the observation of video recordings via a closed-circuit television system. Seven hundred and eighty-three students ranging from 6 to 10 years of age and from three different schools participated in the experiments. Particularly, movements on stair flights and landings were analyzed separately for a group of 54 students of the first grade (6 years-old), for a comparative analysis of the distances and velocities obtained with methods used by other researchers and significant differences were found. In addition, by the present method, the dispersion of velocity values in a population was studied; thus, the shape of its frequency distribution could be verified. An uncertainty estimative of the method is presented together with the discussion of its usage difficulties.

Language: en

Keywords

children; engineering data; evacuation; movement; staircase; travel routes