Heat flux profile upon building facade due to ejected thermal plume from window in a subatmospheric pressure at high altitude

Abstract This paper compares the heat flux profile upon building external facade due to ejected thermal plume from window in a subatmospheric pressure (64 kPa, Lhasa, Tibet, altitude: 3650 m) with that in normal pressure (100 kPa, Hefei, altitude: 50 m) and proposes a global correlation for these two pressures. A set of experiments is carried out in a 0.4 m cubic scale room model with a facade wall attached and a window of various geometries in these two altitudes to study the influence of the ambient pressure on the heat flux profile upon external facade due to ejected thermal plume from the room. Water-cooled heat flux gage arrays are employed to measure the vertical heat flux profile upon the facade wall. It is found that the heat flux profile upon the facade wall in the vicinity of window is much higher in the subatmospheric pressure than that in the normal pressure. A new global correlation is proposed to characterize the vertical profile of the heat flux upon external facade in the thermal plume region by accounting for relative entrainment change in these two pressures.