On the "Cabins" Fire Safety Design Concept in the New Hong Kong Airport Terminal Buildings

The "cabins" fire safety design concept in the terminal buildings of the new Hong Kong international airport is evaluated in this paper. Retail shops in the terminal hall are taken as cabins in which it is highly possible to get a flashover fire. Correlations for the flashover time were derived using sixty simu lations for cabins of different sizes employing the fire protection engineering tool FASTLite. Heat generated by the fire would be conducted out through the cabin wall or ceiling to the terminal hall and the associated heat transfer equations are reviewed. Upon flashover, the whole cabin becomes a large hot object and a ther mal plume would be induced. Smoke generated in the cabin would flow out from the door left opened for human egress. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) was used to study the smoke filling process in the terminal hall for cases with and without a cabin.