Full-scale experimental simulation of the stack effect pressure acting on an elevator door system in a high-rise building

Abstract

The pressure-bearing performance of an elevator system under the stack effect in a super high-rise building is usually difficult to simulate directly in a laboratory environment due to the difficulty in fully meeting the similarity requirements. In this paper, a new full-scale experimental device for simulating stack pressure was designed in a large boundary layer wind tunnel laboratory, which was based on using wind pressure to simulate the action of thermal pressure on an elevator door system. By employing this approach, the pressure-bearing performances of an elevator door system under different levels of wind pressure of the static and dynamic conditions were systematically investigated, and the malfunction of the elevator door system due to the strong stack effect was successfully simulated. The critical pressure threshold of the elevator door system, which was difficult to evaluate accurately in previous studies, was then measured and it was approximately equal to 150 Pa. Meanwhile, the pressure-bearing state of the elevator door system was numerically simulated and compared with the wind tunnel experiment results. The study shows that the simulation employing the dynamic mesh model can accurately reflect the force characteristics of an elevator lobby door during its physical process of opening and closing. Finally, based on the experimental simulation results, the pressure-bearing thresholds of the elevator door systems of several typical high-rise buildings were estimated, and the reasonability of the full-scale simulation was finally verified by comparisons with field measurement data.