DEM Evaluation of Evacuation Behavior: A Case Study of "The Mosque of ASMU"

Safety is a primary consideration in any building. There are many risk factors which can cause casualties such as earthquake and fire. An important consideration in an emergency situation is the evacuation of people. This is of great importance when a large number of people are in confined spaces such as mosques and subway stations. To evaluate the evacuation of a place, an effective way is simulation. In this paper, as a case study, we simulate the evacuation behavior of the mosque of Azarbaijan Shahid Madani University (ASMU) using Distinct Element Method (DEM) in which an analysis of the position of each person can be computed step by step by solving the equation of motion. Four cases with different number and width of exits are considered, and evacuation behavior including evacuation time, density on exits, and flow rate are estimated quantitatively. Evacuation time is calculated to be 591, 156, 138 and 114 sec for cases 1 to 4, respectively. Density on exit 1 is equal to 4.5 (person/m2) for all four cases, and on exit 2 is calculated to be 4.23, 2.4, 2.4 and 1.47 (person/m2), for cases 1 to 4, respectively. As results show exit widths and number of exits have great influences on evacuation behavior. It is recommended that before construction of public buildings, evacuation simulations to achieve optimum evacuation behavior to be done.