Fire and evacuation analysis in BWB aircraft configurations: computer simulations and large-scale evacuation experiment

How long would it take to evacuate a blended wing body (BWB) aircraft with around 1,000 passengers and crew? How long would it take an external post-crash fire to develop non-survivable conditions within the cabin of a BWB aircraft? Is it possible for all the passengers to safely evacuate from a BWB cabin subjected to a post-crash fire? These questions are explored in this paper through computer simulation. As part of project NACRE, the airEXODUS evacuation model was used to explore evacuation issues associated with BWB aircraft and to investigate fire issues, the CFD fire simulation software SMARTFIRE was used. The fire and evacuation simulations were then coupled to investigate how the evacuation would proceed under the conditions produced by a post-crash fire. In conjunction with this work, a large-scale evacuation experiment was conducted in February 2008 to verify evacuation model predictions. This paper presents some of the results produced from this analysis.