Fire Evacuation Performance Simulation of Staircases Under Two Renovation Strategies for Early Modern Brick–Timber Buildings: A Case Study of a Hui-Shaped Chinese Baroque Architecture in Harbin

It is a common phenomenon that the stairs of modern historical brick and wood buildings can not meet the existing fire protection specifications, which has become a difficulty in the repair. Based on this, this paper proposes two different repair strategies for the Chinese Baroque "Hui" shaped building in Harbin, and uses the computer fire evacuation performance simulation as the method to explore the influence of the changes of stair width, number, location and building size on the safety movement duration and number of individuals who failed to evacuate in the two repair strategies, and compares the effectiveness of common fire prevention measures. It is found that the fire development laws of the two building repair methods are similar when corre-sponding to the same stair state and building volume; When the width of stairs in-creased from 900mm to 1100mm, the evacuation effect was not significantly improved; Increasing the number of existing interior staircases from one to two increases the proportion of safely evacuated occupants from 68% to 91%.; The exterior corridor staircase shows the highest evacuation efficiency, with a single staircase sufficient to ensure the safe evacuation of all occupants; Given the same increment in total area, the increase in evacuation movement time caused by adding stories is approximately twice that caused by expanding the building footprint.; The fire prevention effect of automatic sprinkler and mechanical smoke exhaust is more obvious.