Evaluation of Composite Steel-Concrete Slab Performance Subjected to Travelling Fire: A Case Study

Abstract

This paper presents a case study which aims to contribute a better understanding of the fire performance of composite slab panel structural under non-uniform fire. A travelling fire which simulates the procedure of fire spread over a large office compartment is introduced. The coupled CFD modelling and heat transfer model is used for the fire and thermal analysis. The elevated composite slab temperatures are applied to finite element model for structural fire analysis by using ABAQUS. The phenomenon of tensile membrane action in partially fire protected composite slab when subjected to travelling fire is presented. It has been observed that the predicted office compartment fire has slower temperature growth rate than that of the ISO 834 standard fire as well as the parametric fire. The study has found out that the traditional structural fire engineering design may lead to over-conservative prediction with respect to composite slabs structural fire performance under travelling fire.