Structural Fire Design: The Role Of Time Equivalence

Abstract

This paper describes the process of designing structures for fire resistance. emphasizing the importance of using realistic design fires. The concept of equivalent fire severity is described and illustrated with a number of examples. Equivalent fire severity is useful where standard fire resistance test results are available, but time equivalent formulae may be very inaccurate beyond the range of data for which they were calibrated. It is much more accurate to perform structural fire resistance calculations from first principles.