A series of experiments under various smoke control conditions during an atrium fire were conducted in a reduced-scale compartment that was constructed to be a 1/8-scale modeling of the PolyU/USTC Atrium. The steady-state fire experiments were conducted and the distributions of temperature and smoke visibility were measured. The result indicates that the smoke exhaust rate, exhaust inlet location, fire source power and the lower region pressurization can impact the effectiveness of the exhaust systems. As expected, the descent of the smoke layer can be reduced with the increase of smoke exhaust rate. It also can be found that the exhaust system, which the exhaust inlets were located equably under the smoke layer, is effective in extracting gases from hot layer. The lower region pressurization experiments demonstrated that this method is an effective smoke control method. This will be contributed to the fact that the exhaust system needs the air supply from the lower of the space to replace the air flowing out of the vents. More comprehensive studies on exhaust inlet location, exhaust rate, makeup air inlet location and air supply rate are needed.
Keywords. Atrium building; fire; smoke control
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How to cite this article
Liu, F., Fu, X. and Lin, Z. (2003). 'Smoke exhaust experiments in an atrium model'. SET Proceedings, 2(1), pp. 301-304. https://doi.org/10.65582/set.2003.067
