Scaling Study of Smoke Spread from Building Integrated Photovoltaic (BIPV) Double Skin Facade Fire for Achieving Sustainable Buildings and Cities

Due to the shift to sustainable design of buildings and cities, the building integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) is getting more attention. However, this technology may bring new challenges to safety in buildings and cities, i.e., fire safety issues regarding BIPV fire induced smoke propagation in double skin facades (DSF). To study this phenomenon, it is essential to conduct experiments, in which full-scale fire experiments are often inefficient regarding economics and safety. To cope with these issues, this study proposes a new scaling method, which applies the helium sub-scale tests to replace full-scale fire smoke tests for buildings with DSF during BIPV fires. To verify this scaling method, three groups of cases are defined and simulated by fire dynamic simulator (FDS), i. e., full-scale with fire (FSF), small-scale with fire (SSF) and small-scale with helium (SSH). Then, a small-scale experimental model is constructed to validate the FDS model. At last, the simulation results are compared among SSH, SSF and FSF cases, which show acceptable agreement. Therefore, the new scaling method of smoke spread from BIPV DSF fires is justified, which can be applied to the study of BIPV DFS fires induced smoke control in urban scale.