Numerical study on smoke movement driven by pure helium in atria

The hot smoke test is often used for commissioning fire smoke management system in atrium buildings, in which liquid fuel is burnt to generate a buoyant plume mixed with artificial tracer smoke to model a fire smoke. The method is usually costly and often causes safety concerns. This paper studied an alternative method of using a cold smoke test, in which pure helium is used to create the buoyant plume. A method was developed to determine the supply rate of pure helium necessary to achieve the same buoyancy effect as that of the corresponding hot smoke test. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations of the helium smoke tests were conducted and compared to the measured hot smoke tests in a full-scale naturally ventilated atrium and a sub-scale atrium with mechanical ventilation. A new method was added in the CFD model to track the smoke layer height for the simulations of helium smoke based on the concentrations of smoke and helium. It is found that the predicted smoke layer heights based on the mass fractions of the tracer smoke are generally close to the measured ones in the hot smoke tests of different heat release rates. A non-dimensional temperature in the hot smoke test is also found closely related to the dimensionless helium concentrations in the helium smoke test for the atria modeled. Although the consumption of pure helium for a full-scale helium smoke test can be very high, it is promising to use the pure helium smoke test in the lab-scale experiments as the preliminary tests of full-scale and/or lab-scale testing of real fires.