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ABSTRACT

Compared with other types of buildings, high-rise buildings have a higher cooling load and are more energy-intensive, which leads to periods of peak electricity demand on the utility grid during the summer. Therefore, reducing the cooling load of high-rise buildings is critical to energy savings and reduction of peak electricity demand. Ventilative cooling (VC) has proved to be an effective solution to reduce cooling load. However, the stack effect in the large vertical spaces of high-rise buildings, e.g. atria, is beneficial for VC but is also a great challenge for high-rise fire smoke protection. Segmentations were often applied in the large vertical space of high-rise buildings to reduce the stack effect for fire smoke protection. The authors' previous study found that the segmentation could effectively protect the upper space which is far from the fire source, but it reduces the energy savings of VC due to the higher flow resistance. In this study, a novel ventilation approach using an independent shaft in atria for achieving fire safety and energy efficiency was proposed. The shaft is designed for VC when there is no fire and exhaust smoke when fires happen. CFD simulations and building energy simulations were used to study its VC and fire protection performance. The results indicate that the independent shaft could effectively remove indoor overheating and exhaust smoke.