Experimental and numerical study on fire-smoke movement in enclosed atrium

Establishes a salt-bath experimental system to study the indoor fire-smoke movement in a 62 meter high enclosed atrium. Smoke movement driven by the thermal plume by the density difference between thermal smoke and cold air in the prototype building is modeled by water flow movement by the density difference between brine water and fresh water in the scaled model. Simulates the smoke movement in actual fire situation with the FDS software.The comparison of the simulation and the experiment results shows that though the salt-bath experiment ignores the effect of both the time lag by the smoke detector and the cooling convection along the atrium wall, the prediction deviations of thermal stratification height and the time to stabilization state are small. For a fire with the intensity of 1 MW, it is practicable to apply the salt-bath experimental method to predict the fire-smoke movement characteristics in the enclosed atrium and estimate the performance of the exhaust system.