Global structural fire performance of large-scale steel structures - Application of a rigorous Hybrid Fire Simulation approach (GOFIPSS)

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Markus Knobloch
• Subject Area: Structural Engineering, Building Informatics and Construction Operation
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 507899544

The research plan outlines the intended investigations to be performed on the analyses of the global structural fire performance of steel structures. The plan presents the issues arising from fire hazards, the conventional analyses approach and the shortcomings of single component fire testing, the beneficial interaction mechanisms evolving in fire, the methodology of Hybrid Fire Simulation (HFS) and its potential to evaluate the structural fire performance and assess interaction and failure mechanisms, and a comprehensive work package plan. Fire in steel structures can cause excessive damage to structural components; and in rare cases lead to global failure of the structure. Such fire-induced failure often gets initiates with the onset of instability in a single component and can propagate through the structural system causing failure of the entire structure. The structural fire performance is usually assessed based on simplified methods and single component standard fire testing with idealized boundary conditions that capture neither load redistribution when a component undergoes thermal expansion, temperature-induced strength and stiffness degradation and inelastic deflections nor time-varying realistic boundary conditions. So far, there exists no methods to quantify methodologically the beneficial interaction mechanisms that evolve between fire-exposed components in a fire compartment and the fire-protected adjacent structure and to consider consequent varying boundary conditions in component fire testing. The difficulty of carrying out large-scale data-driven fire tests is a limitation to advancing knowledge as well as to developing new evaluation methods for effectively describing and mitigating fire hazards. By both carrying out systematic lab fire tests on global steel structures and developing a rigorous approach to HFS, the GOFIPSS project will scientifically address the load redistribution due to interaction mechanisms between fire-exposed structural components and the cooler adjacent structures and use experimentally validated hybrid simulation techniques to enable new approaches to fire safety science. The main objectives and steps are as follows: - Perform full-scale physical furnace tests on global steel structures to obtain load redistribution effects and interaction mechanisms between fire exposed elements and cooler adjacent members; -Produce a robust HFS model for the evaluation of the structural fire performance of steel structures that is validated with the data generated from the full physical tests, so that the interaction and failure mechanisms can be understood; -Develop a physically sound performance-based analysis approach to improve structural efficiency of steel structures in fire. This approach addresses the long-standing problem in the discipline, with both verifying the phenomenon of load redistribution experimentally and enabling the quantification of the inherent performance of large-scale structures in fire.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants