Towards a fragility assessment of a concrete column exposed to a real fire – Tisova Fire Test
2017 (English)In: Engineering structures, ISSN 0141-0296, E-ISSN 1873-7323, Vol. 150, p. 537-549Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]
Fires can cause substantial damage to structures, both non-structural and structural, with economic losses of almost 1% GDP in developed countries. Whilst design codes allow engineers to design for the primary design driver, property protection is rarely, if ever, designed for. Quantification and design around property protection has been used for some time in the seismic community, particularly the PEER framework and fragility analyses. Fragility concepts have now started to be researched predominantly for steel-composite structures, however, there has been little to no research into the quantification of property protection for concrete structures, whether in design or in post-fire assessments of fire damaged structures. This paper presents selected results from the thermal environment around, and the thermal response of, a concrete column from a large scale structural fire test conducted in Tisova, Czech Republic, inside a four-storey concrete frame building, with concrete and composite deck floors. From the results of the fire test, assessments of the fire intensity are made and used to model the potential thermal profiles within the concrete column and the implications that high temperature might have on the post-fire response of the concrete column. These thermal profiles are then used to assess the reduction of the columns cross-sectional area and are compared to a quantified damage scale for concrete columns exposed to fire. This analyses presented herein will also show that common methods of defining fire intensity through equivalent fire durations do not appropriately account for the complexities of the thermal and structural response of concrete columns exposed to a travelling fire
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2017. Vol. 150, p. 537-549
Keywords [en]
Concrete column, Damage assessment, Fragility assessment, Large scale structural fire test, Tisova Fire Test, Travelling fire, Columns (structural), Concrete construction, Concretes, Damage detection, Fire protection, Fires, Flammability testing, Losses, Seismic design, Damage assessments, Fire tests, Structural fires, Travelling fires, Structural design
National Category
Natural Sciences
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:ri:diva-30786DOI: 10.1016/j.engstruct.2017.07.071Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85026374904OAI: oai:DiVA.org:ri-30786DiVA, id: diva2:1138752
Note
Funding details: EP/K022369/1, EPSRC, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council; Funding text: The authors would like to express their most sincere thanks to; all of the firefighters of the fire and rescue service in Carlsbad for their enthusiastic support; the BRE Centre for Fire Safety Engineering students from Imperial College London, Luleå Technical University, the University of Edinburgh and Technical University Ostrava; and thanks to Majaczech, CSTB and CERIB. The work reported has been carried out within projects supported financially by grants from the Swedish Fire Research Board (Brandforsk), and from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council in the UK (EPSRC) – EP/K022369/1.
2017-09-062017-09-062019-06-27Bibliographically approved