Experimental and numerical study of buoyancy-driven stairwell flow in a three storey building

The present work extends an earlier investigation on buoyancy-driven air flow through a stairwell. A series of experiments was performed in order to study the coupled flows of mass and heat between the three floors of a full-scale residential building. A single tracer gas decay technique was adopted. Air flow rates through the specific stairwell were estimated using the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method. These rates showed very good agreement with the corresponding values provided by the formulas, proposed in an earlier study. Finally, the simulated fields of air velocity and concentration of tracer gas were compared with the experimental data.