Steel Beam-To-Column Connection Fire Design: Fid-Bau Portal

Steel Beam-To-Column Connection Fire Design

Chloe, Jeanneret / Austin, Martins-Robalino / John, Gales / Aikaterini, Genikomsou / Panagiotis, Kotsovinos

With architectural styles changing and the knowledge of fire behaviour constantly evolving, it is important to continue advancing the field of fire safety engineering to ensure that the existing and expanding infrastructure is safe and resilient. Within the National Building Code of Canada and subsequent provincial and material design standards, there exists flexibility for designers to consider more advanced computational practices that can optimize the fire protection design. These clauses permit alternative design solutions to be used when they can be proven to be equivalent or superior to the prescriptive design. This, however, can be hard to implement regarding structural fire designs as the Authorities Having Jurisdiction (AHJs) typically do not have the fire education and resources to evaluate and compare a design. Alternative solutions, especially for structural fire design, allow for economic and material savings. A performance-based solution is able to check for all possible scenarios and optimize the fire protection, reducing the environmental impact of the design by reducing the need for excess fire protection, which can be toxic and have negative life cycle analysis impacts. The connections are known as the most vulnerable part of a steel-framed building construction. A preliminary series of fire tests were undertaken at York University’s Fire Resiliency Lab, with different methanol pool fire durations, to understand the deformation behaviour of a simple steel post-and-beam frame and how the forces and heat are dissipated into the connections. With an accurate understanding of the thermal forces created by a localized fire, the design of connections would be able to dissipate the large forces that occur through ductile connections. The tests demonstrated how connections and the remaining structure behave intrinsically when exposed to thermal forces, such as displacements and rotations.