Post-fire load bearing assessment of industrial steel and stainless steel buildings

Nowadays, the focus of reliability-based validation of the post-fire bearing capacity of structures is on multi-storey buildings used for dwellings or offices due to the high human impact related to the use of the building. Research has been done using first order reliability-based methods to assess the behaviour of simple single isostatic concrete slabs, which is commonly used in this type of buildings. But, the knowledge of the post-fire behaviour of structures is also of high economic importance for industry and companies. Today, a lack of knowledge on the behaviour of single storey framed hyper static steel structures exist. The main goal of this research is to simulate the consequences of natural fire on industrial steel or composite structures, to compare the simulations against results available in the literature and to provide a method to evaluate the remaining structural load-bearing capacity. With only a limited amount of data, using numerical techniques, the temperature distribution in enclosures can be known and, from that, the structural response be predicted. Furthermore, it is known that the failure mode, in case of fire, of this kind of framed structures is always determined by the moment resisting beam-column nodes. A force-based method directly delivers the needed information for a framework and can be easily arranged in a statistical format. With the results of the theoretical analysis, the residual bearing capacity of the considered structure can be assessed after exposure to the fire.

Publication year:2020

Accessibility:Closed