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Performance-based design of RC beams using an equivalent standard fire

Robert Kuehnen (Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Western University, London Ontario, Canada)
Maged Youssef (Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Western University, London Ontario, Canada)
Salah El-Fitiany (Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Western University, London Ontario, Canada)

Journal of Structural Fire Engineering

ISSN: 2040-2317

Article publication date: 23 December 2020

Issue publication date: 18 March 2021

103

Abstract

Purpose

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. The purpose of this paper is to review and assess the application of an existing time-equivalent method in the performance-based design of reinforced concrete (RC) beams.

Design/methodology/approach

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.

Findings

It is shown that the examined time equivalent method is able to predict the sectional response with suitable accuracy for performance-based design purposes.

Originality/value

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.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful for the financial support provided by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the India-Canada Center for Innovative Multidisciplinary Partnerships to Accelerate Community Transformation and Sustainability (ICIMPACTS), and Western University.

Conflicts of interest: Robert Kuehnen, Maged Youssef and Salah El-Fitiany declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Citation

Kuehnen, R., Youssef, M. and El-Fitiany, S. (2021), "Performance-based design of RC beams using an equivalent standard fire", Journal of Structural Fire Engineering, Vol. 12 No. 1, pp. 98-109. https://doi.org/10.1108/JSFE-02-2020-0008

Publisher

:

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited

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