Theses and Dissertations from UMD

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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    Fire Safety of Today's and Tomorrow's Vehicles
    (2008-05-02) Levy, Kevin Martin; Sunderland, Peter B; Milke, James A; Fire Protection Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This thesis considers fire hazards in the existing vehicle fleet and uses failure modes and effects analyses of three generic designs to identify and rank potential fire hazards in the Emerging Fuel Vehicle (EFV) fleet. A statistics based predictive quantitative risk assessment framework and estimated uncertainty analysis is presented to predict risk of EFV fleets. The analysis also determines that the frequency of fire occurrence is the greatest factor that contributes to risk of death in fire. These preliminary results predict 420±14 fire related deaths per year for a fleet composed entirely of gasoline-electric hybrid vehicles, 910±340 for compressed natural gas vehicles, and 1300±570 for hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles relative to the statistical record of 350 for traditional fuel vehicles. The results are intended to provide vital fire safety information to the traveling public as well as to emergency response personnel to increase safety when responding to EFV fire hazards.