Olympic arena - concept and design development.

This paper presents an original air conditioning concept and design development elaborated for a large arena, designed to accommodate the indoor sporting events during the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia. An air conditioning system, which provides a great level of flexibility and economical operation, has been developed and its performance studied in detail by the use of our computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software. The CFD analysis has confirmed the advantages of the system by achieving a uniform temperature distribution and appropriate air velocities in the occupied areas, under all operational situations. The proposed concept is also a key element of the smoke management strategy for the arena. Hence the study has been extended to incorporate evaluations of smoke concentrations for various fire scenarios.