The Effect of Natural Wind to the Atrium Building Smoke Migration

With the rapid economic development of our country, the speed of city construction is accelerated and more proposed development with super high and super large space construction has appeared, hence the relevant fire problems are still a challenge. It's acknowledged that performance-based design provides more reasonable and innovative design strategies for fire engineers. The CFD simulations are always executed to validate the feasibility of performance - based design. Current fire safety engineering design and fire engineering researches are focused on the fire generating and smoke migrating in the building. Seldom consideration is given on how the natural wind of outside the building affects the smoke migration pattern. However, it will be unrealistic that ignore the natural wind factor in smoke control design. Especially, it will be unacceptable in the natural wind smoke control design which utilizes the natural wind to exhaust smoke out of the building. As well as more investigations will be required in the mechanical smoke control design. The paper integrates the PHOENICS which is the general purpose CFD software with the statistic data about the natural wind from the specific area/city to analyze how the natural wind can impact on the fire and smoke generated in the atrium of a large space building, so as to provide some references for the future smoke control designs.