Smoke Control In Corridors - Towards A Next Generation Experimental Facility

Corridor ventilation systems are of the most common fire safety solutions used in buildings. However, there seems to be inadequate amount of knowledge related to the performance of these solutions in fires. For that purpose we have developed a novel full-scale experimental facility along with a CFD digital twin (please refer to talk of Dr Węgrzyński). The corridor testing facility consists of a 30 m long corridor (1.40 m wide, 3.00 m tall) connected to three individual compartments, in which the source of fire can be located. The facility is equipped with variety of state-of-the-art smoke control systems, representative for solution used in high rise buildings in Poland and UK. In this talk we will show the genesis and justification of the novel full scale experimental facility, along with a brief background on common smoke control solutions used in UK and Poland. Different smoke extraction technologies (ducts, shafts, different configurations of inlets and outlets) and the physics of corridor ceiling jets will be demonstrated with the use of the facility. Furthermore, the talk will focus on practical aspects of the design features of the facility that enables for multiparametric experiments, and how the initial experimental campaign was designed to take the advantage of these unique features. Results of the first batch of fire experiments (approx. 50) will be presented. We hope that this talk will help us also survey the Fire Modelling community in their needs related to the future experimental programme in the facility, that could lead to improvements in validation of commonly used CFD software for this particular use.