Smoke control using a double-skin façade

Double-skin façades have been increasingly used as they open up new possibilities for clients and planners seeking creative new designs that are intelligently adapted to environmental conditions. Among them natural ventilation is commonly carried out in a building with double-skin facades. However double-skin façade construction is still not covered by statutory building regulations. Virtually no information exists on the behavior of this kind of façade in case of a fire. Usually for a building with a multistory double-skin façade, smoke of a fire room escaping through the inner façade into the intermediate space between the two skins may accumulate and spread horizontally and/or vertically to other rooms that have openings connected to the intermediate space for the purpose of natural ventilation. However if smoke pressure in the intermediate space can be kept lower than that of the room, smoke spread through the openings will be prevented. Considering similarity of smoke movement and stack natural ventilation, in this paper a double-skin façade used for natural ventilation is also considered for smoke control. As the results, it is proved that smoke spread can be prevented with suitable opening arrangements. Therefore natural ventilation and smoke control can be realized through one system. Reduced scale model experiments and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis are carried out in this research.