This project aims to develop validated computational tools and technical guidance to enable performance-based structural fire resistance design, moving beyond current prescriptive methods for building fire safety and ensuring safer and more cost-effective structural fire designs for buildings in the US. The project develops scientific information on how fires affect the performance of common engineering and commercially available fire-insulating materials and structural connections and utilizes results of real-scale fire experiments from the companion project, Measurement of Structural Performance in Fire, to validate the modeling approach.
Experimental setup for quantification of Butt welds performance at elevated temperatures.
Objective
To produce validated computational tools and technical guidance enabling the development of performance-based standards for the cost-effective fire resistance design and assessment of structures.
Technical Idea
This project will develop a methodology for integrating fire as a design condition in building design, thus enabling performance-based design (PBD) tools and guidelines for structural fire safety. Current prescriptive methods for building design and evaluation cannot accurately assess structural performance in fire, as buildings are designed for natural hazards but only protected against fire effects. This project will collaborate with the National Fire Research Laboratory (NFRL), who will conduct real-scale structural fire experiments of common building systems through the “Measurement of Structural Performance in Fire” project to study the effects of fire exposure to structural members, systems, and connections subjected to realistic fire conditions. Data from these fire experiments will be used to validate high-fidelity, nonlinear computational models that account for temperature-induced material degradation and thermal expansion effects. The advanced, validated computational model will be simplified in ways that ensure the accuracy of the performance prediction to enable wider application in structural fire safety design in practice. Additional experiments will be conducted to assess how temperature exposure affects concrete and cementitious insulating materials.
Research Plan
This project aims to develop a performance-based framework for evaluating building fire performance by integrating new and existing knowledge on structurally significant fires, material behavior, and structural response to thermal-structural loading. The project will focus on:
Testing will include a two-story steel gravity frame (two bays × three bays) with a composite concrete slab-steel deck floor system. A 6.1 m × 9.1 m (20 ft × 30 ft) test bay will be hydraulically loaded to simulate service conditions. Composite floors are widely used but pose modeling challenges due to fire-induced weakening. The study will analyze symmetry, geometry, connections, thermal expansion restraint, and fire exposure. Pre- and post-test modeling will refine design tools for engineers.
Prior to full-scale testing, five long-span composite beams were tested to examine failure modes and connections under fire exposure.
This research will enhance fire-resistant structural design, providing engineers with validated tools for safer, performance-driven building fire assessments.