Analysis of laboratory data on fire resistance testing and comparison with numerical predictions

Abstract

Fire testing is a very important field of the structural engineering. The most important task of fire testing is to determine the fire resistance of structural members, which means to find out the behaviour of a building element when subjected to particular heating. Tests on construction elements are performed by the Fire Testing Laboratory of the ArGEnCo department, in order to observe their behaviour under fire and to determine their fire resistance. In parallel, the fire research team performs numerical simulations, using the finite element software SAFIR, developed in the department. The combined study with experimental and numerical modelling allows to further examine the behaviour of constructions subjected to fire. The aim of this master thesis is to conduct analyses about the capabilities of numerical simulations to capture and reproduce the results of different types of fire tests. The research wants to find out if there are some systematic deviations in the forecast of such tests, and if there are differences between the assumption of the numerical model and the conditions in the laboratory test. Thus, in this work, the chosen experimental tests and the related results are going to be described deeply. Then, information about how these tests have been modelled using SAFIR are going to be given. Furthermore, a comparative analysis of the experimental and numerical results will be discussed. Conclusions and recommendations about capabilities and limits of the numerical models to predict the outcome of the fire test are going to be described in the last chapter.