Fire Performance of High Strength Concrete using a Novel Fire Testing Method

Abstract

Due to the degradation of high strength concrete performance(HSC) at elevated temperature, it is of great significance to have a detailed knowledge of the properties of HSC at elevated temperature. In conventional fire tests, furnaces are commonly employed to heat concrete. However, the thermal boundary condition provided by furnaces has been proven inconsistent and unreliable. The results achieved through conventional fire tests should be re-examined. In order to solve this problem, a novel fire testing method using radiant panel system is introduced. It is able to set up a consistent, reliable and uniform thermal boundary condition in fire resistance test of HSC. Furthermore, two digital information capturing methods: Digital Image Correlation(DIC) and actuator are applied to measure the deformation of HSC during the test. A series of solutions are proposed to deal with the limitations of these two methods and reliable measurement is achieved. Moreover, the fire performance of HSC is examined using this novel testing method under three conditions: ambient temperature test, unstressed-hot test and stress-hot test. The results demonstrate the compression strength, stress-strain curve and elastic modulus of HSC at ambient temperature and elevated temperature.