Assessment of post-earthquake fire capacity of RC frames without seismic design

Abstract

To study the importance of post-earthquake fire events, 500 reinforced concrete (RC) frames were designed without seismic considerations. These consist in three-bays frames with a variation in the number of floors from two to six (100 frames each). Numerical analyses were performed in SAFIR to investigate the influence of different types of damage, damage location, fire location and fire curves on the post-earthquake fire resistance of the structures. It was observed that the seismic damage can significantly decrease the fire resistance of the frames. In an earthquake scenario it can be expected an increase in the response times of the firefighters as well as malfunctioning and damage of active and passive firefighting measures, which means that the use of parametric fire curves without active firefighting measures can be a better approach instead of the use of the fire curve ISO 834. It was observed, for the analysed cases, that parametric fire curves without active firefighting measures led to lower collapse times when compared to the fire curve ISO 834. On the other hand, when the active firefighting measures are considered, there is a very significant number of structures that do not collapse, which indicates the importance that these firefighting measures can have in a fire after an earthquake. The development of these analysis emphasizes the impacts of applying different fire curves on the damaged structure which consequently brings attention to an adequate definition of the fire curves.