A critical analysis of the influence of architecture on the temperature field of RC structures subjected to fire using CFD and FEA models

Abstract

The temperature–time-heating curve describes the dynamics of a fire in a room. A variety of factors related to the architecture and the thermal properties of the furniture influence the temperatures. The reinforced concrete (RC) structures of the buildings are designed for the case of fire with standardized curves that ignore the real fire temperatures. In this study, a group of individual rooms were solved numerically to understand the thermal cross-sectional field in RC structures based on real fire curves. The fire dynamics of the room were defined by a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model solved with the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) software. A finite element analysis (FEA) model was created for the RC structures and solved using Abaqus software. A typical RC ribbed slab on the roof of the room was considered. The structure was heated according to the real and standardized fire curves. The real fire temperatures were up to 70 % lower than those predicted by the standard. The results show how safe the buildings are from fire-induced collapse.