FIRE RESILIENCE OF STEEL-CONCRETE COMPOSITE FLOOR SYSTEMS

Published

November 30, 2022

Author(s)

Selvarajah Ramesh, Lisa Choe, Matthew Hoehler, Matthew Bundy

Abstract

This paper presents the results of compartment fire experiments conducted on 9.1 m × 6.1 m steel-concrete composite floors in a full-scale, two-story, two-bays by three-bays steel gravity frame building to investigate the fire resilience of these widely used floor systems. A total of three composite floor specimens with varying slab reinforcement and fire protection schemes for the secondary beam were tested. The first experiment (Test #1) was designed to achieve a 2-hour fire resistance rating per current U.S. practice and create baseline data for the behavior of the building. Test #2 and Test #3 were conducted to study the effect of enhanced slab reinforcement and unprotected secondary beams on the fire resilience of the composite floor systems to develop methods to improve the structural performance of the composite floor assembly and reduce construction costs. The test floor was located on the first story in an edge bay of the test structure and exposed to a single-bay compartment fire using natural gas fuelled burners while subjected to hydraulically applied gravity loads. The compartment test fire created upper-layer gas temperatures like those in standard fire resistance tests. The experiments show that the use of enhanced slab reinforcement maintained the structural integrity of the tested slab for more than two hours even with an unprotected secondary beam.

Proceedings Title

Proceedings of the 12th international conference on structures in fire

Conference Dates

November 30-December 2, 2022

Conference Location

Hung Hom, HK

Conference Title

12th International Conference on Structures in Fire

Pub Type

Conferences

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.22178072

Local Download

Keywords

Composite floor, compartment fire, steel frame building, large-scale fire experiment

Citation

Ramesh, S. , Choe, L. , Hoehler, M. and Bundy, M. (2022), FIRE RESILIENCE OF STEEL-CONCRETE COMPOSITE FLOOR SYSTEMS, Proceedings of the 12th international conference on structures in fire, Hung Hom, HK, [online], https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.22178072, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=935782 (Accessed October 24, 2025)