About Air Pumping through Openings in a Room Fire

Abstract

The air pumping effect of a fire plume would give higher air intake rate through vertical openings in a room fire. The phenomenon was proposed in 1976, studied again in 2012 and  revisited again. The main application is to explore optimum operation scheme of positive pressure ventilation to handle big hazardous fires. The big ministorage fire in 2016 faced numerous challenges. Air pumping of such a big fire should be studied further. This article pointed out the key works reported in the literature. Derivation of the key equations for the air intake rate through vertical openings found in the literature and application of Computational Fluid Dynamics are reviewed for further studies on big fires.