Ventilation system fire safety in the Xchange building

Abstract: The majority of the deaths when a fire takes place are due to the smoke. The fire gases can easily spread through the ventilation system if it is not properly designed and some safety measures are taken. The current legislation suggest as solution to install independent ventilation systems or smoke barriers. However, the new Swedish legislation will offer new possibilities base on smoke dilution. While the smoke dilution is within a range of values the systems are safe and new design possibilities appear. From this point of view, the ventilation system of the project Xchange from the company Skanska has been studied along this thesis. Both the risks from the possible smoke spread through the ventilation system and the opportunities it provides to extract the smoke are considered. With the help of PFS, Program Flow System, different ventilation systems are tested in order to find a safe configuration that fulfills all the requirements set by the new legislation. The layouts are simulated under different fire conditions characteristics such as temperature, flow and position inside the building. Before performing the simulations, the Xchange project is described and the present legislation and the fire smoke spread basics are studied. Also the implementation of the model in PFS is explained. The results obtained from the simulations allow discussing the strong and weak points of each layout in order to decide what layout should be built.