Computer Analysis Of Smoke Protection Of An Atrium Building In A French Business Centre

Abstract

In France, the design of smoke control systems for buildings open to the public commonly depends on regulatory requirements on minimal values of smoke vent areas for each building space, in natural ventilation.These regulations proved unsatisfactory for atrium buildings, and in some cases building designers as well as safety authorities must be provided with specific means for designing a smoke control system and evaluating its efficiency. This paper gives an illustration of what computer analysis can bring for this purpose, through the example of an atrium building in a new business centre near Paris (CNIT / La Defense) .Simulations of smoke movement throughout this 5-storey building containing an 18-metre high atrium were carried out with the CSTB multiroom computer code CIFI.The roughness of zonal description in the model is balanced by the capability of treating the physical system as a whole for the computer simulations. Consequently, the analysis allowed us to draw relevant information from simulation results, and then contributed to the elaboration of a reasonable agreement resulting in the acceptance of the project (the business centre has been recently inaugurated) .

Iteration Of Smoke Movement Simulation Processes For An Optimized Specification Of Ventilation Parameters, With A View To Control Fire-induced Smoke Flows In Atrium Buildings

“…We have mentioned in a previous paper [2] the unsuitability of this regulatory approach for smoke control in atrium buildings, citing a number of reasons [3]. Nevertheless, various points of view exist with regard to the possibility of standardization in that field [4-71. Recently, some attempts have been made [8,9] to obtain comprehensive information from simulation results carried out with computer models.…”

“…Restricting our ambitions, we shall now present several procedures which iterate smoke movement simulation with a view to optimizing ventilation parameters such as vent area or fan-powered flow rate, in cases where atrium buildings are concerned. The CIFI computer model was used for the various simulations involved: CIFI is a multiroom model (already presented in [2] and [12]), the main features of which are: a finite volume model incorporating gas stratification in rooms; heat and mass transfer for each of the zones (gases/walls); fire plumes and doorjet entrainments calculated by means of appropriate formulae found in the literature (eg. [13,14] for further information).…”