The Reduced Cross Section Method Applied to Glulam Timber Exposed to Non-standard Fire Curves

Abstract

Timber is an desired material for structural applications due to its green credentials and attractive external appearance. Fire safety design of timber structures is largely limited to considering the exposure of elements to the standard fire, to which timber demonstrates exceptional resilience. This paper reports on a series of tests which were carried out with the intention of exploring the impact of non-standard fires on timber elements. Because of the natural variation in timber elements, the tests and the resulting analysis of the test results were conceived and designed in such a way that as much information about the statistical distribution of the response of the elements as possible could be obtained. The resulting testing programme comprised four furnace fire tests, each of eight loaded timber beams, with three different temperature time curves: two standard fire tests, one long-cool parametric fire and one short-hot parametric fire. The reduced cross section method for structural calculations is extended in this paper to parametric fire exposures, and the results of the tests are compared with this method. It is shown that the thickness of the zero-strength layer is dependent on the temperature time curve to which the timber is exposed in the furnace and that the 7 mm zero-strength layer prescribed in EN 1995-1-2 may be un-conservative for members in bending. For the cases studied, the zero-strength layer thickness in bending is shown to be around about 15 mm under standard fire exposure and 16 mm under exposure to a long cool parametric fire. Conversely, the zero-strength layer is only 8 mm deep under exposure to a short hot parametric fire. This has implications for the design of timber elements not only for parametric fire exposure in enclosures, but also perhaps for the use of timber elements in large open structures such as halls or arenas where more localised fire exposure or travelling fire exposure may be expected.