FUTURE SAFETY AND SECURITY RESEARCH IN EUROPE Prague, Czech Republik, October 24-25, 2013

GASEOUS PROPAGATION IN A RAILWAY TUNNEL:

GRID INDEPENDENCY WHILE CFD-BASED RESEARCH
M. Muhasilovic1,5, B. Sirok2, I. Vela3, K. Ciahotny4, V. Koza4,
A. Mededovic5, E. Covrk5, A. Fejzic5
1
IOM-MIDWEB-Programme of the United Nations in Sarajevo
muhasilovic@gmx.net muhasilovic@yahoo.com
2
University of Ljubljana – Faculty for Mechanical Engineering, Ljubljana
3
BAM Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing, Berlin
4
VSCHT – the Institute of Chemical Technology, Prague
5
The IPSA-Institute, Sarajevo

Abstract

Corrective engineering is unavoidably dominating the sector of research while applying novel
regulations in science and technology onto already existing subsurface infrastructures.
The importance in both cargo and personal transport, where in the times before the last
devastating war, every 15 minutes within the 24 hours, either personal or a cargo train-
composition was passing between the southern and northern part of Bosnia and Herzegovina, was
justifying reason for the construction-work of the specific railway tunnel as an underground traffic
communication.
Subterranean traffic spaces, built once for both static way of trafficking (such are multi-storey car-
parks) or serving for better road- and railway-communication (such are tunnels), do comply with
this situation: build to last far longer than several human life-times and constructed during an
another environmental, state- or other kind of legislature, these objects are now confronted with a
new set of qualitative rules and must undergo the corrective engineering. Such occurrences
appeared with every new legislature that was applicable for the engineering and technology – and
this especially for the objects made in a large-scale fashion. Prevailing cases in such research-
moves are when one dares to perform a corrective CFD-based engineering, for sake of better
(more intensive) traffic-communication – hence the tunnels that stand under novel directive-sets.
Almost limitless advantage for the research in a mode of corrective engineering, supported by the
software-tools, are based on sophisticated scientific achievements in the numerical approaches
from the last quarter of the 20th century and – further more – are based on the strong development
of the hardware in the years of 2000. These surroundings actually employed the Computational
Fluid Dynamics even more in the area of corrective research-actions.
The importance of the grid independency within a computational domain for CFD-based
investigation, employing both k- and LES turbulence-treatment within the old and still in-
use railway-tunnel in Bosnia and Herzegovina, near Sarajevo is demonstrated and discussed
in this “Work-In-Progress”, while exploring particular scenarios of an accidental thermal load
in this underground-space traffic-object and the smoke-propagation in it.