Sub-scale helium tests and numerical simulations for studying the effect of location and magnitude of BIPV double skin façade fires on the smoke spread

Nowadays climate change all over the world, imposed risk to human health, security, and economies. Thus, renewable clean energy sources have been recently promoted as the means of sustainability of world’s energy system and mitigation for the climate change impacts. It is still questionable if the new building technologies such as photovoltaics are well observed in terms of finding the associated risks. According to the wide application of PV systems and lack of investigation on the BIPV (specifically on the façade), there is high demand of studying scenarios through which the fire behavior and smoke propagation are extensively noticed. Hence in the current research, the smoke spread from BIPV DSF (Double Skin Façade) fire is investigated employing the helium tests and a newly proposed helium similarity. The experiments are conducted for the parametric study of the case study building for different location of the fire on the façade and different heat release rates (HRR). Moreover, to link the dimensionless full-scale real fire simulated temperatures with the downscaled dimensionless helium test measurements, a new equation of similarity is proposed. Subsequently, via proposed theory and Froude modeling, the helium test is designed and carried out. The validated numerical simulation in Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) can verify the governing theory and scaling method between small-scale helium test and full-scale real fire smoke test.