Evacuation with smoke control for atria in green and sustainable buildings

The concepts of green buildings and sustainable buildings are promoted actively in the developed countries. Targets are on protecting the environment, using less energy through natural ventilation provisions and daylight utilization, developing better waste management and taking water conservation into account. Architectural and building design, electrical and mechanical systems, and building management have to be upgraded. However, there are problems in dealing with fire safety, especially in complying with the existing prescriptive fire codes. An obvious example leading to hot arguments is the green or sustainable buildings with an atrium. Smoke spreading would give problems and evacuation design under smoke was identified to be a key issue. Providing more emergency exits might give a faster evacuation time, but would give security problems. An alternative solution is to install a smoke management system to keep the smoke layer high. Better designs can be achieved by integrating the evacuation time with the smoke filling time under different scenarios. Evacuation design can be improved by installing a smoke exhaust system. System performance by fire safety management would provide adequate safety. This point will be demonstrated in this paper. © 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.