Localised Fire Assessment of a Steel Structural Solution in a Pilot Building

Abstract

Many tragic fires in the past decades have highlighted the importance of fire safety engineering and its meaningful application in the engineering field. With a constant and significant growth of the research the classical approach based on prescriptive time‐temperature curve, where the gas temperature is assumed to be constant within the entire compartment and always increasing on time has been challenged by a performance‐based one. Performance‐based approach is aiming to represent the fire accounting for more physics than the prescriptive approach, considering ignition, fire growth burning and cooling phase. Nowadays practitioners facing the design stage of a project have to face the choice between designing with prescriptive or performance‐based approach. In this work a comparison between design using performance based and a prescriptive approach will be provided. In particular, the building is under development in the framework of a demonstration RFCS (Research Found for Coal and Steel) project called DREAMERS, founded by the European Commission. The chosen structure for this example is an 800 m2 steel building, which will be built in the Campus of the University of Salerno (Italy). The main peculiarity of the building is the implementation of all the most advanced technologies for the construction of a resilient structure in terms of seismic, robustness and fire safety. The building is designed in steel and steel composite solutions, following a holistic design approach and foreseeing a life time monitoring of its behavior. The flooring system is made of Asymmetric Floor Beams (AFB) and Cofradal® 260, whereas vertical elements are hot rolled HEB sections. The work here presented is showing some of the main challenges related to the fire design as well as application of next generation localised fire models.