A Study on the development of a decision model on free flow and congested traffic conditions to determine the optimal ventilation capacity in highway tunnels

According to the local highway tunnel ventilation guideline, ventilation capacity calculation should be performed at the speed ranging from 10 km/h to 80 km/h. This is so reasonable method considering uncongested and congested traffic conditions in urban tunnels. But recently due to low traffic volume and very low congestion frequency in rural highway tunnels, it seems to be an inadequate way to apply the guideline. Therefore the calculation should be performed separately for the free flow and congested traffic cases classified by the appropriate decision model. This paper aims at determining unnecessary running speed range for reasonable tunnel ventilation design, considering free flow and congested traffic conditions. Firstly, traffic volumes in highway tunnels were collected and if any, the causes of congestion were investigated. And with concept of 'margin speed'(u  u m ), the decision model on traffic congestion was developed. Applicability of the decision model was also analyzed with case study. According to the results, when design speed is 100 km/h, with V/C less than 0.1, then the range of unnecessary speed in tunnel ventilation design is less than 40 km/h; for V/C ≦ 0.35, V/C ≦ 0.6 and V/C ≦ 0.75, the unnecessary speed ranges are found to be ≦ 30, ≦ 20 and ≦ 10 km/h, respectively.