The General Method for the fire design of I-section web-tapered beams

Abstract

The present investigation describes a numerical and parametric study on the validation of the General Method (GM) for the fire design of web-tapered steel beams using GMNIA.The GM covers the safety check of structural elements with complex support conditions and/or of non-prismatic members, as the non-uniform geometry prevents the use of the standard verification clauses. However, the fire part of the Eurocode 3 (EN 1993-1-2) provides no further indication regarding its applicability at elevated temperatures, apart from adapting the methodology to fire using the reduction factors for steel material properties, which is identified as a gap in the current version of the norm.However, previous investigation by the authors have shown overly conservative results for the adapted General Method and a calibration of the EN 1993-1-2 buckling curve has previously been proposed, although the parametric study was not representative enough for full validation.With that in mind, supported by an extensive numerical framework of over 25000 laterally restrained and unrestrained tapered beams at elevated temperatures, a precise and accurate calibration of the General Method is developed in the scope of this work.