A Research of the Elevator Evacuation Performance and Strategies for Taipei 101 Financial Center

Issues revolving around the use of elevator evacuation in highrise buildings for emergencies (both fire-related and nonfire-related) have long been under debate. This research investigates the performance of using elevator evacuation in Taipei 101, the second tallest building in the world. Taipei 101 Financial Centre (the main building) is used mainly for office occupancy and contains a total of 61 elevators. The analysis for this study was carried out using simulation results from building EXODUS and FDS. The results show that using elevators as a method of evacuation can help shorten up the time in a nonfire-related emergency, but in the case of fire events, elevator evacuation is less effective due to the nature of the structural layout, reliability of electric power and other factors. The results for nonfire-related evacuation time found in this study correspond to some literature on elevator evacuations from abroad.