EXPERIMENTAL STUDY ABOUT STAIRS INCLINATION AND WALKING SPEED IN DESCENDING THE STAIRCASES

At the disaster such as earthquake and fire, improving safety of stairs is important on evacuation safety designs of buildings. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between dimensions of stairs and ratings of impression with descending stairs. We carried out questionary survey and experiments with actual size model and building. Results are summarized as follows ; 1) For improving safety of stairs(160-180mm rise), we need to precede the dimension of tread. However, as increasing walking speed, we need to decrease the dimension of rise, 2) Dimensions of stairs 160mm-180mm rise and 270mm-300mm tread are estimated proper for descending stairs. If the stairs are narrower than 270mm tread, the dimension of rise needs to be lower, 3) when each stair is constructed various dimension, the impression for stairs decrease. Especially, a difference between the maximum and minimum value is over 23mm rise or 20mm tread, it gave the subjects some bad impression on descending stairs.