Energy and fire safety performance of atrium ventilation in high-rise buildings

Abstract

Ventilative cooling is an effective approach to remove indoor overheat, thus reducing cooling load and peak electricity demand. In high-rise buildings, the stack effect could contribute to more building ventilation and coolingrelated energy savings. However, it also brings much concern on the fire safety issues, which, therefore, blocks the ventilative cooling application in high-rise buildings due to the limited study on the interaction effects between fire safety and energy efficiency of high-rise ventilation. To fill in this research gap, this paper aims to investigate the impacts of fire safety design, i.e. adding segmentation in the high-rise atrium, on the high-rise ventilative cooling performance. Both fire smoke simulations and building energy simulations were conducted to investigate the impacts of segmentation slab on the performance of fire protection as well as the ventilative cooling. It was found that the segmentation could effectively protect the upper space which is far from the fire source, but it reduces the energy savings of ventilative cooling due to the higher flow resistance. Therefore, it is quite necessary to evaluate both of fire protection performance and energy efficiency for high-rise ventilation design.