The Balcony Spill Plume: Entrainment of Air into a Flow from a Compartment Opening to a Higher Projecting Balcony

In the design of smoke ventilation systems, a crucial input parameter for balcony spill plume calculations is the mass flow rate of gases at the spill edge. In some cases, depending upon the specific geometry, these calculations can require the entrainment of air into a flow from a compartment opening to a higher projecting balcony to be determined. Entrainment of air into these smoke flows are not well understood and the current guidance available to the designers of smoke ventilation systems is crude. This work presents a simple empirical correlation to predict the entrainment of air into these flows, and hence, the subsequent mass flow rate of gases at the spill edge. A combination of computational fluid dynamics modelling and physical scale modelling was used in the analysis. In general, this work has demonstrated that the current guidance on the entrainment of air into these flows is conservative.