FIRE DESIGN OF STEEL MEMBERS - Civil and Natural Resources ...

6 COMPARISON OF METHODS USING OTHER FIRE
CURVES:
6.1 INTRODUCTION:
To ensure that the results found by comparing methods of calculating the thermal
response of steel beams exposed to the ISO 834 fire gives reasonable and accurate
results, the same comparisons have been repeated with other fire curves. As
described in Section 2.4.2, there are five Eurocode Parametric curves being studied
in this report with varying fuel loads and ventilation factors and a constant wall
lining value. These variations are to provide a range of fires and demonstrate that
the methods here can be applied to many cases. Since each parametric curve is
different, only one beam size has been used in this section to reduce the
repetitiveness of the results and reduce the time to analyse the same procedure
many times. Real fire experimental data has also been used to verify the thermal
response methods used in this report.
6.2 EUROCODE PARAMETRIC FIRES:
6.2.1 Introduction:
The Eurocode Parametric curves are more realistic curves than the ISO 834 fire as
the temperature depends on the ventilation, the fuel load present and the thermal
properties of the wall linings of the compartment. The duration of heating of the
parametric curve is dependent on the amount of fuel available and it has a decay
phase that occurs after the peak, which is also dependent on the fuel load and
ventilation of the room.
The SAFIR pre-processor developed by John Mason has a function allowing
different fires to be analysed with the SAFIR programme that could not be
analysed before. The Eurocode Parametric fire is one of these, and by entering
appropriate values for the opening factor, wall lining properties and fuel load the
fire can be defined.
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