Computer Simulation And Model Experiment On Smoke Management System In Atrium

Because of its pervasive vision and its flexible application, atria are more and more popular in modern buildings. At the same time, the main feature of structure on atria is a floor opening or series openings connecting two or more stories. This structure feature has challenged the traditional smoke control technology, which is the concept of floor-to-floor compartmentation, adopted in tradition buildings. Thus, the smoke management system, adopted in atria, has been posed.Based on two-layer zone model, the mathematical model of atria smoke management system, including smoke filling, gravity venting and smoke exhaust, was developed. By using MATLAB computer language, a program was developed. This Windows style program can simulate the smoke management system of atria and the simulated results can be described by graphs.The results simulated by the program are compared with the experiments. The experimental data come from the smoke filling experimental data conducted by USTC, the data of gravity venting and smoke exhaust in the examples of The Report of the Development on Fire Protection Design in Buildings, written by Japanese Construction Commission, and the smoke exhaust experiments data conducted by the author. The agreement between the simulated results and the experimental data is good. It has been proved that the simulating program is reliable.On the other hand, an experimental small-scale model, which is 1:8-scaling model of the PolyU/USTC Atrium, was established. The effects of some factors on the smoke layer interface of the smoke exhaust system in atria are studied by using the orthogonal experiments. The results of orthogonal experiment shows that the effect of the volumetric flow of exhaust gases is the most notable; the effects of the number of exhaust inlets and the heat released rate of fire source are less notable than the effect of the volumetric flow of exhaust gases on the smoke layer interface; the effects of the separation of exhaust inlets, the interrelation between the number and the separation of exhaust inlets and the location of exhaust inlets are notable; but the rest factors' effects are not obvious.