Study on The Method for Translating Fire Resistance Time between Standard Fire Furnace Test and Compartment Fire Part 1: Translation Method of Fire Resistance Time

Abstract

In performance-based structural fire safety design, various calculation models are used to predict the structural behaviors of building elements exposed to fire. Although many of such calculation models require material properties of building elements as input data, it is often technically and economically difficult to obtain such material properties. A potential alternative is to develop a method to translate the fire resistance time of a building element assessed by existing fire furnace testing to the time for which the element can endure in arbitrary compartment fire conditions.

In this paper, we checked and explored the possibility of such a translation method of fire resistance time between fire furnace tests and ventilation controlled compartment fires and tried to identify the data that are indispensable in performance-based structural fire safety design. It is found that ‘equal heat absorption’ hypothesis is not appropriate as the translation basis. Instead, we propose a practicable and direct translation method of fire resistance time at which the temperature becomes critical temperature as one of the fire resistance criteria. In this method, it is not necessary to know the properties of the building element tested although it is necessary to have the thermal property of compartment boundary.