Structural fire resistance

News and Updates

Groups of people sit or lie in a parking lot surrounded by low buildings as fires burn in the forest beyond.

NIST Issues New Guidance for Emergency Response During Wildfires

August 23, 2023

Lessons learned from the 2018 Camp Fire in California include strategies for protecting lives when there is not enough time to safely evacuate all residents.

Photo shows a NIST firefighter on standby watching a shed burn next to a target structure representing a wall of a residence during an experiment.

For Sheds in Wildfire Zones, NIST Researchers Determine How Close Is Too Close to Home

June 1, 2023

How far away do sheds need to be located to significantly limit fire spread to homes? New research led by NIST has begun to provide important answers.

Flames rising from a burning fence are spreading to a tree above and a shed nearby.

NIST Study Finds Wildfire Hazards in Residential Fences and Mulch Beds

August 11, 2022

When building fences and landscaping their properties, homeowners should keep fire safety on the top of their minds.

Projects and Programs

Compartment fire test of a two-story steel gravity frame with composite floors.

Measurement of Structural Performance in Fire

Ongoing

Objective - To support the development of performance-based building codes, validate computational tools for structural fire resistance, and apply new metrology techniques to characterize structural responses to fire through large-scale experiments. What is the new technical idea? Innovation in

Publications

Fire Resilience of a Steel-Concrete Composite Floor System: Full Scale Experimental Evaluation for Influence of Slab Reinforcement and Unprotected Secondary Beam (Test #3)

October 2, 2023

Author(s)

Selvarajah Ramesh, Lisa Choe, Matthew Hoehler, Matthew Bundy, Rodney Bryant, Giovanni Di Cristina Torres, Brian Story, Anthony R. Chakalis, Artur A. Chernovsky, Philip Deardorff, Michael Selepak

The National Fire Research Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology conducted a series of large compartment fire tests to investigate

Fire Resilience of a Steel-Concrete Composite Floor System: Full-Scale Experimental Evaluation for Influence of Slab Reinforcement (Test #2)

June 1, 2022

Author(s)

Lisa Choe, Matthew Hoehler, Matthew Bundy, Rodney A. Bryant, Brian Story, Anthony R. Chakalis, Artur A. Chernovsky, Selvarajah Ramesh, Xu Dai

The National Institute of Standards and Technology is currently conducting a series of large compartment fire tests to investigate the behavior and fire-induced

Finite element analysis of the lateral capacity of cold-formed steel shear walls after fire exposure

December 9, 2021

Author(s)

Shuna Ni, Xia Yan, Matthew Hoehler, Thomas Gernay

Cold-formed-steel construction frequently relies on strap-braced, cold-formed-steel framed walls as the lateral-force resisting system. While the behavior of

Experimental Study on Fire Resistance of a Full-Scale Composite Floor Assembly in a Two-Story Steel Framed Building

October 7, 2021

Author(s)

Lisa Choe, Selvarajah Ramesh, Xu Dai, Matthew Hoehler, Matthew Bundy

The purpose of this paper is to report the first of four planned fire experiments on the 9.1 m × 6.1 m steel composite floor assembly as part of the two-story