Fire model analysis and experimental validation on smoke compartments

Referring to fire accidental data, more than half the deaths from accidental fires are due to smoke rather than fire. In addition to using smoke curtain to accumulate smoke, it is necessary to consider appropriate smoke compartmentation effects for practical smoke control design. Otherwise evacuation and extinguishing systems would not be operated adequately. However, under the existing fire code of Taiwan, there are many constraints applied to construct smoke compartments inside buildings. Sometimes, it cannot work out for practical design purposes, such as the area of smoke compartments were limited without exception of performance consideration. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the phenomena related to fire, heat, and smoke during some postulated fire scenarios occurring in a multicompartment enclosure and the distribution of smoke flow field. Two different fundamental fire models, CFAST and SMARTFIRE, are used for analyzing and predicting the experimental results from a full-scale test. The comparison results show quite reasonable variations between numerical simulation and experimental data. Although the temperature data are higher than experimental data, the predicted smoke layer heights are lower than experimental data. However, the fire models present correct trend of accumulated smoke layer height and temperature distributions in a multicompartment structure.