Contributions to Building Smoke Management

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The average annual fire incidents in Canada were around 60,000 with over 3,300 injuries and deaths, and a 1.2 billion dollar loss. Inhalation of smoke or toxic gases, rather than fire burns, is considered the major cause of fatality in building fires. It is of great importance to determine smoke movement and design a reliable smoke management system to prevent smoke from blocking evacuation route during a fire, especially for high-rise buildings and buildings with large spaces, where there is a higher risk that occupants will be exposed to smoke. Computer models are indispensable tools for high-rise building smoke management and three types of computer models are available at varying accuracy and computational cost: network, zone, and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models. Presently, none of these models used individually can satisfactorily perform a fast whole-building analysis and simultaneously provide required accuracy and detailed spatial information for large or near-fire spaces. Therefore, this research aims to develop a public-domain integrated computer model, which integrates a network and a CFD fire model, to greatly improve whole-building analyses of smoke movement. The integrated model will use the CFD for spaces where detailed design information is required, and the network model for the rest of a building for fast computation. This study will add an energy equation solver to suit the network model to the simulations of fire smoke transport. A best integration strategy will be identified to resolve the temporal inconsistency of the two models. The integrated model will be validated against the existent full-scale data in the literature and by the laboratory experiments at a sub-scale test facility, and further applied to actual high-rise and skyscraper buildings. The research will also result in a better understanding of the physics of building smoke propagation and insights into the performance of smoke control systems. The research will contribute to designing safer buildings, reducing life and property losses, and training of HQP for their future roles in building smoke management and fire protection in Canada.