Case Study on Modeling Fire Action Complexity in Fire Safety Engineering of Structures

Abstract

Important goals in the fire safety design, such as preventing loss of life and goods damage, are achieved by maintaining the stability of structures exposed to fire for a period of time established by norms and standards. Real fire scenarios confirm that the specific technical regulations which actually have a prescriptive character (both national and international) do not deal with sufficient possibilities regarding the assessment of structural fire safety. The new approach on structural safety, based on engineering notions, gives us additional prospects on it and it is included in the issues of the fire safety design of structures. A relatively new field of study, known by a few professionals focused on fire safety (but well acknowledged in the research area), fire safety design met with lots of changes and restructuring of the governing concepts and procedures and of the information with which they operate, due to the fast accumulation of experience in this area of engineering activity. Consequently, after countries such as Australia, Canada, New Zeeland or USA provided towards professionals specific technical regulations for fire safety design, groups of experts in these aforementioned countries have joined their forces to try to diminish the differences that exists between those regulations and to give a unitary character to them, a better conceptualized engineering approach of the fire safety design. The result: occurrence of the publication International Fire Engineering Guidelines (last edition from 2005). The systematic approach of fire safety design in constructions pointed, once again, the possibility of modular organization of this field of study, the relations between modules being established according to the objective or objectives in the fire safety design for a specified building. This article aims to put forward, from this modularized perspective, the study of the fire safety design of a building exposed to fire; hence, the practical part of the article exhibits the numerical simulation of initialization and development of the fire process for a large scale religious building. The main features of the building represent the amount of space that facilitates the spreading of smoke and warm gases and which increases the risk of damaging the structural reinforced concrete elements. Application calls to specific numerical simulation with a higher degree of credibility, such as those realized by the FDS (Fire Dynamics Simulation) software.