Fire Hazard of Electric Vehicles in Enclosed Structures

Abstract

The need to reduce pollution from fossil fuels has led in recent years to an increase in the number of electric vehicles circulating in our cities; this leads to the need to analyze the functionality and risk situations of the infrastructure with which these vehicles will interact. As part of this research, we focus on issues related to fire risk in covered parking lots due to the case of charging electric vehicles. The article proposes to analyze the case of a generic covered parking lot, the dimensions of which were derived by considering an average among the dimensions of some standard parking lots. The analysis was conducted with computational fluid dynamics software, OZone, developed in collaboration by the University of Liege with Arcelor Mittal, which allows calculation of the thermal actions generated by a given fire and the evolution of the temperature field in structural steel elements.