Probability Based Structural Fire Load: Fid-Bau Portal

Probability Based Structural Fire Load

Razdolsky, Leo

Probability-based structural fire load and its application to building design is intended to be a practical and useful tool to structural and fire prevention engineers, architects and educators. The objective of the article is to bridge the gap between prescriptive and performance-based methods and to simplify complex computer analyses to the point that the probabilistic structural fire load will have a simple approximate analytical expression. The main audience is practicing structural and fire prevention engineers and researchers. Probabilistic structural analysis methods provide a means to quantify the inherent risk of a design and assess the sensitivities of dimensionless uncertain parameters, which now have discrete random values. This article provides systematic (step-by-step) applied, probabilistic analysis of structural fire load that is presented here as a dimensionless temperature-time random function. The main findings are as follows: mean values of maximum temperatures; variances; safety (risk) quantification; acceptable probability of failure (or minimum reliability); confidence probability; partial safety factor; correlation functions and the corresponding spectral functions; and the so-called "first-occurrence time problem". They are presented in this article in dimensionless forms. Therefore, they are intrinsic in each fire severity category. In probability-based structural fire load design, the structural reliability formulation is presented in such a way as to make it practical for design by engineers who may not be familiar with reliability concepts or have access to the necessary statistical data.