Experimental Investigation of the Effect of Fire Protection Lobby on Stair Pressurization System in a High-Rise Building

In this study, the stair pressurization system in a 40-storey high office building in Istanbul is investigated through field tests, in order to understand the effect of the presence of a non-pressurized vestibule (fire protection lobby, FPL) before entering the stair at each floor. The building without FPL is simulated by keeping only one of the two doors (of the stair and FPL) open at each floor. This method gave an opportunity to fix other parameters affecting the stair pressurization system and check solely the effect of FPL. Two different cases are taken into account, where the first one (all doors closed) analyses the condition that all stair doors are kept closed and the second one (critical doors are open) is conducted when the stairwell is opened to the floor on a given level (fire floor) and the stair termination door at the discharge floor is kept open. For both cases, the availability of the FPL is investigated by using the aforementioned arrangement. Under the conditions with approximately the same pressurized air flow rate at all doors closed condition, it is found that the availability of FPL increases the pressure difference between the stairwell and the corridor by a factor of approximately 2.2. This is also justified by using empirical formulations available in literature, where this ratio is calculated as 2.0. The results of this study showed that the FPL arrangement improves the effectiveness of pressurization system in a very high-rise building, despite some tolerable drawbacks.