Fire Resistance of Light-framed Wood Floors Exposed to Real and Standard Fire

Abstract

A performance-based design method related to fire safety should begin at the stage of fire resistance evaluation using the fire severity to assess the fire risk of any structures. This study developed a new model to predict the fire growth behavior in a real compartment and to provide an alternative to the existing standard fire in terms of fire safety design. This method could provide a quick evaluation of natural fire curves for use in structural fire safety design. In addition, heat transfer through light-framed wood floor was modeled using the temperatures provided from fire growth model as the input values, which predicted the time-dependent temperature distributions at a certain time step. The time-dependent temperature distributions were converted into the distributions of mechanical properties within the structural elements by employing the relationship between temperature and the mechanical properties, which were then transformed into sections with the strength and stiffness at a particular ambient temperature. The fire growth model and heat transfer model were verified using full-scale compartment fire tests.