The Analysis of the Natural Smoke Filling Times in an Atrium

Abstract

This paper presents an investigation on the scenarios of the natural smoke filling times in an atrium due to a located floor fire. Based on the Heskestad's correlation, the heat release rate and the effective height of the fire source were transformed into an equation associated with the diameter and perimeter of the fire source. Neglecting the thermal effect for heat release due to relatively small temperature rise in the atrium and applying the assumption of mass conservation, the height of smoke layer interface can be derived. In this study, the various plume models such as McCaffrey's correlation, Zukoski's correlation, Thomas's correlation and NFPA 92B's correlation are considered with both steady fire and unsteady fire situations. The comparisons between the theoretical results and the experimental data were also made and discussed.

Thermo-Fluid Dynamics Analysis of Fire Smoke Dispersion and Control Strategy in Buildings

“…Once started, the fire goes through three stages: growth, fully developed (in which the HRR remains constant) and decay [45,46]. Normally the growth phase of the fire is modeled in such a way that the HRR is directly proportional to the time squared (t-squared fires) [47,48], that is:…”

Review and Validation of the Current Smoke Plume Entrainment Models for Large-Volume Buildings

“…A summary of the approaches used in a wide range of chosen countries is shown in Table 1. More advanced approaches include time-integration of the plume equation, in order to obtain the smoke layer height in the compartment as a function of time [25,31]. Despite the dominant role of CFD calculations in modern design process, zone models are still a valuable tool [5], and they are widely used for specific uses that lie within the limits of the empirical correlations on which they are basedsuch as the design of nuclear power facilities [32], warehouses (applying the empirical correlations to single smoke reservoirs), different types of atria, stadiums, etc.…”

“…Comparison of plume correlations and of some design approaches in which they are implemented were widely reported in the literature, e.g. [31,[41][42][43][44][45]. Despite the profuse amount of studies, only few compare the modelling approaches with large-scale fire experiments, mainly due to the lack of high-quality experimental data.…”

“…The concept of time-integrated solution was presented in the past, e.g. by Morgan et al [25] and Wu and Chen [31].…”

“…The change in HRR = f(t) will also cause a change in the diameter of the fire (if HRR per unit of area is assumed constant) or the change of HRR per unit of area (if the diameter of fire is assumed constant). The effects of these changes to the plume model were discussed in [31].…”