To better understand the fire behaviour of in-plane restrained reinforced concrete slabs, this paper presents six fire tests on two-way spanning concrete slabs under compressive bi-axial in-plane and flexural outof-plane loads. The data presented include furnace temperatures, temperature distributions, vertical and horizontal deflections, restraint forces, crack patterns, and characterisation of spalling of the six slabs during both heating and cooling phases. Comparison of the results indicates that bi-axial in-plane loads may have a negative effect on the vertical and horizontal deflection trends of the restrained slabs in fire. In addition, snap though behaviour and subsequent severe reversals of deflection trends were observed for the first time in concrete slabs with sustained bi-axial in-plane restraint during heating and cooling stages. Fire behaviour of the restrained slabs were considerably different from those of the simply supported slabs, and thus the effect of uniaxial or bi-axial in-plane restraints on the failure mode should be considered to establish reasonable failure criteria for these slabs. In addition, it is suggested that the corners of the in-plane restrained slabs should be reinforced by arranging the whole span top steels along two directions since the corners easily fracture with large diagonal cracks during fire tests.
In this paper four large scale fire tests on the reinforced concrete slabs, under combined uni-axial in-plane and out-of-plane loading conditions with vertical restraint at four corners of the slabs, are presented. The research focuses on the quantitative relationship between horizontal restrained force and deformations, cracking patterns and spalling of the slabs in fire. Also the vertical restraint forces at the four corners of the slabs were measured in the tests. Comparisons of the results indicate that the compressive uni-axial in-plane loads have a considerable effect on the number and directions of cracks on the top of the concrete slabs in fire. The uni-axial in-plane restrained slabs have larger mid-span deflections and lower deflection recovery ratios than the slabs without in-plane loading. In addition, the test results indicate that increasing reinforcement ratio can effectively prevent the integrity failure of the restrained slabs. The research generates valuable test data which can be used to validate the numerical models developed by fellow researchers in the field of structural fire engineering.
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