Global Structural Behavior of Steel-Concrete Composite Floor Systems under Traveling Fires

Abstract

This paper presents a computational investigation aimed at better understanding the global structural behavior of a steel-concrete composite (SCC) floor system subjected to single-story 1D traveling fires. Using the traveling fire methodology (TFM), a range of spatially and time-varying fire exposures are applied to a threedimensional (3D) finite element (FE) macro-model of a SCC floor system designed following US design standards and practices. The sequentially coupled thermalmechanical simulations were carried out using ABAQUS, where the structural modeling approach was verified using experimental test data from the Cardington fire test. Essential factors influencing the fire resistance of SCC floor systems, namely the passive fire protection scheme of the floor beams, and the traveling fire burning size, were varied to investigate and characterize the global structural response. Simulation results were analyzed and useful trends were observed, in particular the dependency of the slab vertical displacement rate and the maximum vertical displacement to both the distance from the fire origin and traveling fire burning size. Particularly interesting was the observation of high tensile forces generated in the beam-to-column connections during the heating phase of the traveling fire.