Prediction of Pressure Distribution in Atrium Fires with CFD Models

With the increasing use of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) in the construction industry, questions are usually raised on whether professionals should develop their own packages or apply commercial packages. Further, presssure predicted in a building fire can serve as a performance indicator on how good the CFD model is when applied to solve a real life problem. In this paper, pressure distributions in an atrium fire were predicted by two CFD codes: the commercial package CFX4.2 and a self-developed code CY-TEAM. This information is very important in designing smoke management systems for buildings with atrium where accurate positions of the neutral plane are required. The results predicted by these two CFD packages for three atrium geometries were compared. It is found that flow variables such as air velocities predicted by these two packages were quite similar but there were some differences in the predicted air pressure.