Shopping Centre Smoke Control
CFD was used in a project involving the covering over of an existing open shopping centre. Due to structural limitations, one of the proposals included a smoke reservoir which significantly exceeded the dimensions recommended by the code (1000sqm, and 60m in length). CFD modelling was used as a validation study, which showed that the smoke control system would maintain a smoke clear layer to the design height, and would achieve a level of performance comparable to an equivalent code compliant smoke reservoir. The design has been approved as a result of the CFD analysis.

Residential Smoke Control
St Pancras Chambers, London, is a listed building adjacent to St Pancras Mainline Station. As part of the proposed refurbishment as a luxury hotel and apartments, strict code compliance would have required cross-corridor fire doors at 30m intervals and fire rated screens to the stairs. Because of the scale and length of the corridors this would have had a significant adverse impact on the historic interiors of the building. A fire engineered solution was developed which considered the unique features of the building as well as active fire safety systems. This allowed two stairs to remain open to the corridors on two floors and the omission of the majority of the cross corridor fire doors. CFD modelling of smoke movement in the corridors and open stairs was used to demonstrate that the proposed solution achieved a comparable level of safety to a code approach.