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

Abstract

AbstractThe 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 (clause 6.3.4 of EN 1993‐1‐1) covers the safety check of structural elements with complex support conditions and/or of non‐prismatic members. However, the fire part of the Eurocode 3 (EN 1993‐1‐2) gives 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.Previous investigations by the authors have shown overly conservative results for the General Method and a calibration of the EN 1993‐1‐2 buckling curve has previously been proposed, although the parametric performed in that study was not extensive enough for a full validation. With that in mind, the present paper has improved these shortcomings by further upgrading the Eurocode 3 formulation and validating the proposal against numerical data from more than 25000 GMNIA simulations.