Investigation of the channelling effect on pollutants dispersion between adjacent roadway tunnels

The health risks presented by noxious vehicle emissions inside tunnels has been amplified due to the increasing use of roadway tunnels. Particularly, for adjacent roadway tunnels, vehicular emissions from the upstream tunnel can further deteriorate the air quality within the following tunnels. A scale vehicle tunnel model was designed to experimentally model the airflow and pollutants dispersion in contiguous roadway tunnels. The channelling effect on pollutants dispersion between adjacent roadway tunnels was studied, and factors such as ventilation speed, open road section length, traffic condition (e.g. car free, car running and traffic congestion) were considered. Pollutants mass flow rate ratio between downstream and upstream tunnels was calculated to evaluate the variation of the entrained pollutants amount. For the car free condition, pollutant can be easily entrained into the downwind tunnel when the gap distance between roadway tunnels decreased. For the car running condition with fixed tunnel gap distance, the traffic speed variation barely changed the pollutants mass flow rate ratio. Furthermore, evident influences on pollutants concentration were observed from continuous congestion and partial congestion. Lastly, numerical simulation using computational fluid dynamics approach was conducted for the car free scenario, and reasonably good agreements were found for pollutants concentration ratio compared with the experimental data. The results yielded from this study further quantified the relationships among different influential factors on the pollutants dispersion between roadway tunnels, and can contribute to an improved tunnel ventilation system design, especially for the downstream tunnel.