On the effect of travelling fire on the stability of seismic-damaged large reinforced concrete structures

Observations and investigations have proved that using traditional fire curves such as standard fire curves and natural fire curves should be limited to small/ medium compartments. in addition,when using the traditional fire curves,a uniform temperature is assumed throughout the compartment. however,for large open compartments,assuming uniform temperature is not compatible with real fires. to overcome this limitation,a nonuniform fire method named as travelling fire is employed as an alternative. a study is performed here on a seismicdamaged large plan three-story reinforced concrete structure designed to meet the life safety level of performance when exposed to a travelling fire. to draw a comparison,the structural fire analysis is also performed using the traditional methods. the results show a notable difference— while the fire resistance based on the travelling fire is around 91 min,it is around 140 min when based on a uniform temperature. this shows that the structure studied is more susceptible to failure when subjected to the nonuniform fire than the uniform fire. © iran university of science and technology 2016.