Civil and Environmental Engineering Publications
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2020
Journal
Journal of Structural Fire Engineering
Volume
12
Issue
1
First Page
98
URL with Digital Object Identifier
10.1108/JSFE-02-2020-0008
Last Page
109
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Abstract
The design of buildings for fire events is essential to ensure occupant safety. Supplementary to simple prescriptive methods, performance-based fire design can be applied to achieve a greater level of safety and flexibility in design. To make performance-based fire design more accessible, a time equivalent method can be used to approximate a given natural fire event using a single standard fire with a specific duration. Doing so, allows for natural fire events to be linked to the wealth of existing data from the standard fire scenario.
In this paper, the use of an existing time equivalent method is reviewed and assessed for application in the performance-based design of reinforced concrete (RC) beams. The assessment is established by computationally developing the moment-curvature response of RC beam sections during fire exposure. The sectional response due to natural fire and time equivalent fire are compared.
It is shown that the examined time equivalent method is able to predict the sectional response with suitable accuracy for performance-based design purposes.
The research is the first to provide a comprehensive evaluation of the moment-curvature diagram of RC beams using time-equivalent standard fire scenarios that model realistic fire scenarios.
