Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

This paper firstly explains that, with regards to the design of buildings with an atrium, due consideration should be given to smoke discharge systems from the atrium to the outside and to the performance and specifications of the atrium peripheral walls and openings. This is partly because the atrium space and the adjacent spaces differ in terms of size, usage, number of occupants and their activities. Secondly, a method of predicting the fire behavior of an atrium, followed by applying the results in an example is introduced. In this example, the fire behavior is predicted for an atrium of 80 m height and 310 mZ base area. In this case it was proven that it would be fire-safe if the following conditions were met: the conditions inside the atrium during a fire are made similar to those of the outside by means of an automatic smoke discharge opening (effective area: 20 ma) at the top of the atrium together with an air inlet (35 ma) at the lower part, and the building has atrium peripheral curtain walls of aluminum, which can resist fire for 1 hour, and an opening with a fixed window with wired-glass of 1.23 m maximum height on each floor.