Analysis of restrained heated steel beams during cooling phase

Abstract

Observations from experiments and real fire indicate that restrained steel beams have better fire-resistant capability than isolated beams. Due to the effects of restraints, a steel beam in fire condition can undergo very large deflections and the run away damage may be avoided. However disgusting damages may occur in the beam-to-column connections, which is considered to be mainly caused by the enormous axial tensile forces in steel beams resulted from temperature decreasing after fire dies out. Over the past ten years, the behaviour of restrained steel beams subjected to fire during heating has been experimentally and theoretically investigated in detail, and some simplified analytical approaches have been proposed. While the performance of restrained steel beams during cooling has not been so deeply studied. For the safety evaluation and repair of steel structures against fire, more detailed investigation on the behaviour of restrained steel beams subjected to fire during cooling is necessary. When the temperature decreases, the elastic modulus and yield strength of steel recover, and the contraction force in restrained steel beams will be produced. In this paper, an incremental method is proposed for analyzing the behaviour of restrained steel beams subjected to cooling. In each temperature decrement, the development of deformation and internal forces of a restrained beam is divided into four steps, in order to consider the effect of the recovery of the elastic modulus and strength of steel and the contraction force generated by temperature decrease in the beam respectively. At last, the proposed approach is validated by FE method.