Research and Development of Large-scale Environmental Wind Field Simulation Device for Fire Experiment of High-rise Building

Abstract

The research and development processing of a large-scale environmental wind field simulation device for fire experiment of high-rise building is introduced from 4 aspects as size and arrangement study of wind supply terminal, velocity design of wind supply terminal, structure design of large-scale device and final installation and commissioning. The simulated wind with the maximum speed of no less than 17m/s can be provided by 200 uniformly distributed ball spout jet diffusers in the region of 8 meters high and 4 meters wide. Introduction High-rise building fires often cause huge casualties and property losses. According to the NFPA report [1], U.S. fire departments responded to an estimated average of 14,500 reported structure fires in high-rise buildings per year in 2009-2013. These fires caused an average of 40 civilian deaths, 520 civilian injuries, and $154 million in direct property damage per year. Generally, the environmental factors, especially the environmental wind field, will have a huge impact on the fire behavior. Therefore, when a fire experiment of high-rise building is performed by researchers, the real fire scenario cannot be well reflected if the effect of environmental wind field is ignored. However, existing environmental wind field simulation devices are mostly used in the field outside the fire science, such as hurricane simulation [2], aerodynamic wind tunnel test [3], wind load simulation [4] and so on. Not only that, the fewer environmental wind field simulation devices applied in fire research still have some limitations in fire experiment of high-rise building that the area of wind supply terminal is insufficient and the angle of airflow is unmodifiable [5,6]. For above problems, a large-scale environmental wind field simulation device is developed to realize simultaneous adjustment on both area and angle of supply airflow for fire experiment of high-rise building. Study on Size and Arrangement of Wind Supply Terminal Based on CFD The effect of environmental wind field simulation device is greatly influenced by the type and arrangement of wind supply terminal. Based on the comprehensive comparison of all kinds of wind supply terminals, the ball spout jet diffuser is chosen because of the long air delivery and adjustable angle in all directions in within 30 degrees. Figure 1. Arrangement of wind supply terminal for 4 cases.