A Comparison Between CFD- and Thermal-Structural Analysis of Structural Steel Members Subjected to Fire

Standard fire resistance curves have been used for so long in the structural fire practice and have governed for almost 100 years. The issues when these curves used can be recognized as that the standard fire curves and the tests in the furnaces do not represent real fires or any fire scenarios. Studying the distribution of high temperature within the steel members is key in order to perform accurate structural analysis and to determine the behavior of the members during fire incidents. As a result, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) was used to develop a real fire and study its effect on structural steel beams. Thermal and structural results from CFD models were compared with results conducted by Finite Element (FE) analysis. Thermal and structural material properties of steel and concrete were adopted by the Eurocode2 and Eurocode3. Two case studies were performed to study the fire resistance of the bare steel beams as well as beams with damage in its fire protection. Results showed that more research is required to determine the efficiency of using such standard curves in fire protection engineering.