Low-pressure water mist fire extinguishing systems are a cost-effective and highly reliable option for fire protection. However, they have not yet seen widespread use in urban underground utility tunnels. To validate the fire extinguishing effectiveness of the system in cable fires within urban utility tunnels and to identify the key factors influencing its efficiency, a scaled-down test platform for low-pressure water mist fire extinguishing in utility tunnels was constructed, and a series of fire extinguishing tests was conducted. The test results demonstrate that low-pressure water mist can rapidly and effectively extinguish cable fires in utility tunnels, with the quickest fire extinguishing time of 7 s. Within 50 s of activating the system, the internal temperature of the tunnel can be reduced from 650 °C to 40 °C. Among the influencing factors, the pressure and nozzle flow coefficient have a significant impact on the fire extinguishing efficiency, while nozzle spacing has a relatively smaller effect. Thus, when the nozzle spacing meets the requirement of “no dead zones”, priority should be given to increasing the pressure and nozzle flow coefficient.

In this study, an underground pipe gallery was taken as the research subject to explore the influence of nitrogen injection flow rate and pipe diameter on the fire extinguishing efficiency in an underground narrow confined space. A liquid nitrogen fire extinguishing test system for the underground narrow confined space was built. The fire extinguishing time, flame height, temperature, and oxygen concentration under different conditions were recorded by liquid nitrogen fire extinguishing tests, and the variations in the characteristics of these data were analyzed. Furthermore, the fire suppression factor, cooling factor, and asphyxiation factor were introduced to quantify the influence of the nitrogen flow rate and pipe diameter on extinguishing efficiency. According to the results, the fire was effectively extinguished by liquid nitrogen in the underground confined space through asphyxiation as the main fire extinguishing mechanism, and the extinguishing time was about 95.5% less than that in the self-extinguishing test. Although the fire suppression efficiency is positively related to the nitrogen injection flow, the asphyxiation efficiency can be reduced when the flow rate is excessive or too weak. Additionally, the asphyxiation factor and fire suppression factor are highly sensitive to the injection pipe diameter. Therefore, a valuable reference is provided in this study for promoting the future engineering application of liquid nitrogen fire extinguishment.