Atria and other large volume spaces do not have the compartmentation that has traditionally been a major contributor of fire protection. Further, the effectiveness of sprinklers in these large volume spaces is limited. For these reasons, smoke management systems for large volume spaces is of particular importance. Three approaches to these systems are smoke filling, gravity venting, and smoke exhaust. Gravity venting is commonly used in the United Kingdom and Australia where smoke exhaust would be used in the United States. The thickness of the smoke layer has been of concern for several years, but methods are now available to ensure that the smoke layer is of sufficient depth for effective smoke exhaust or venting. Issues of stratification, detection, scale modeling, and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) are also addressed in this paper.

Units: Dual