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Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to study the behavior of smoke flow in a typical high-rise residential building fire in six common smoke control systems. Design/methodology/approach - The pressure, temperature and CO2 concentration were used to trace the motion of turbulent smoke flow through CFD. Findings - It is found that the hot smoke could rise up and spread into the indoor space on the upper floors through the staircase. When the pressure in the evacuation staircase is higher, it would be more difficult for the smoke to enter the staircase and transport vertically. On the other hand, the smoke would soon transport to the indoor space on the upper floors horizontally. During this process, the smoke shows a more disorder horizontal transport under the sole effect of thermal buoyancy than the co-existence of thermal buoyancy and the air inlet. Research limitations/implications - Because of the chosen research approach, the research results may need to be tested by further experiments. Practical implications - The paper includes implications for the design of smoke control systems and evacuation in a building fire. Originality/value - This paper fulfils an identified need to study the behavior of smoke in a fire and optimize the design of smoke control systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper puts forward a simple mean-field game that captures some of the key dynamic features of crowd and pedestrian flows in multilevel building evacuations. It considers both microscopic and macroscopic route choice by strategic agents. To achieve this, we use mean-field differential game with local congestion measure based on the location of the agent in the building. Including the local mean-field term and its evolution along the path causes a sort of dispersion of the flow: the agents will try to avoid high density areas in order to reduce their overall walking costs and queuing costs at the stairs and exits. Each agent state is represented by a center of a box that follows a simple first-order dynamical system in an Euclidean space. Each agent will move to one of the closest exits that is safer and with less congested path. First, we formulate the problem and derive optimality equations using maximum principle and dynamic programming with boundary conditions. Second, well posedness and existence results are provided. Numerics and simulations are carried out to illustrate mean-field equilibria of a safer evacuation process. Finally, the methodology is shown to be flexible enough to include movement noises and stochastic structural component of the building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the highlights of the World Expo in Shanghai, China that started on August 14, 2010. The event is expected to surpass the 1970 Osaka Expo held in Japan in terms of number of visitors, which is estimated at more than 70 million. Bureau of Shanghai World Expo Coordination Director Hong Hao said that among the measures taken by his bureau to service visitors were installing sunshades, increasing the number of seats in the site, and distributing paper fans. An evacuation drill was held prior to the opening of the expo.