An Integrated Design of Performance-based Structural Fire Safety Verification Method

Abstract

The historical transition of structural fire safety requirement in Japan is introduced. And it is pointed out that the philosophy of risk management is empirically expressed in existing prescriptive code as different fire resistance requirements according to the number of stories. However, it is disappearing in current performance based verification method by requiring to use the same fire load regardless of the number of stories. To close the gap, this presentation introduces a quantitative method for the acceptable structural failure risk by treating the design fire load as authoritative good practice precautions. It is based on the distribution of the frequencies of fire load obtained by processing existing survey data. In addition to that, a correspondence relationship between design fire load and fire resistance time is also proposed by deriving assumed mass loss rate by the standard heating curve in Fire resistance test. These studies enable us to determine Risk-based design fire load density and required fire resistance time appropriate to the number of stories, and it compares with existing specification criterion.