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ABSTRACT

The idea of using ventilation to keep spaces tenable during building fires goes back to the early days of smoke control. In those days, analysis of the performance of ventilation smoke control was not possible. Because of recent advances in analytical tools, these systems can be analyzed today. This paper presents the idea of using ventilation for stairwell smoke control in tall buildings including a description of the design approach. The analytical tools used are: (1) tenability analysis, (2) computational fluid dynamics (CFD), and (3) network modeling. The results of a CFD analysis including tenability analysis are described, and this analysis demonstrates the feasibility of stairwell smoke control by ventilation. Stairwell ventilation has the advantage over stair pressurization of mitigating the adverse impacts of stack effect and floor-to-floor variations in flow resistance.