Fire Dynamics in Long and Narrow Confined Spaces

Dear Colleagues,

With the rapid development of underground infrastructure—including transportation tunnels, subterranean corridors, utility galleries, and large-scale culverts—fire safety in long and narrow confined spaces has become a critical engineering challenge. Unlike open environments, fires in these highly constrained structures are strongly governed by wall confinement, limited air supply, and restricted ventilation pathways. These factors give rise to unique flame and smoke behaviors, such as plume stretching, intensified heat feedback, accelerated back-layering, and complex smoke stratification.

The increasing diversity of fire hazards in such confined environments further amplifies the complexity of fire dynamics. Fires involving moving vehicles, especially under congested or bidirectional traffic conditions, can generate strong longitudinal airflow disturbances and unpredictable patterns of flame spread. Fuel leakage and spill fires introduce dynamically evolving burning zones that interact strongly with ventilation systems, while electrical cable fires in underground utility tunnels or cable galleries may exhibit rapid flame spread, persistent smoke release, and high-toxicity emissions. These phenomena pose sustained challenges for early detection, fire suppression, and emergency response. Understanding how these hazards develop—and how smoke is transported, accumulated, or stratified under varying geometric constraints and ventilation strategies—is essential to improving fire protection design and emergency management in long and narrow confined spaces.

This Special Issue aims to advance the scientific understanding of fire dynamics and smoke propagation mechanisms in long and narrow confined environments. Contributions involving experimental studies, theoretical analyses, numerical simulations, detection and suppression technologies, and engineering applications are all welcome. By integrating interdisciplinary insights, this Special Issue seeks to promote innovative safety strategies and technical solutions for long and narrow confined spaces.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

1. Fire growth and heat-transfer mechanisms in long and narrow confined spaces.
2. Smoke stratification, back-layering, and longitudinal smoke transport.
3. Fire behaviors of moving vehicles, fuel spill fires, and cable fires in long and narrow confined spaces.
4. Effects of geometry, ventilation patterns, and boundary constraints on fire development.
5. Modeling, prediction, scaling laws, and data-driven approaches for confined space fires.
6. Fire detection, suppression, and emergency response strategies in long and narrow confined spaces.

Dr. Weibing Jiao
Prof. Dr. Weiguang An
Dr. Tao Wang
Guest Editors

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