Natural Fire Exposure of Structural Timber-Contribution to Determine the Influence in the Fully Developed and the Decay Phase
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Author
Date
2020Type
- Doctoral Thesis
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Abstract
Structural fire safety is one of the most important design requirements - regardless of the building material. The development of the fire design of timber structures has been adopted to rules developed for non-combustible building materials, which have defined the standard procedure for testing and the common practice for fire resistance design. Recently, the design basics were questioned including the validity of the testing of structural timber components in furnaces and the applicability of the current design framework to structural timber.
This thesis developed an understanding of the "fire exposure" to describe the thermal exposure of structural timber members in fire compartments. Further, this thesis reported the investigation of the relevant characteristics of fire-exposed timber in standard fire and under non-standard heating regimes. The focus is given to the thermally modified layer of a fire exposed timber member, the char layer, which has not been considered in many previous research studies in fire safety engineering. An experimental setup was designed to study the behaviour of timber under various fire exposures, the Fire Apparatus for Non-standard heating and Charring Investigation (FANCI). Analysing the char layer, it was confirmed that a significant amount of energy is stored in this thermally modified part of the structural timber. For fire resistance tests, it was concluded that the contribution of the char layer varies significantly depending on the fire exposure. As a final result, the Timber Charring and Heat Storage (TiCHS)-model, a model was presented to describe the timber charring and the contribution to the compartment fire. The TiCHS-model was proposed to describe the behaviour of timber in laboratory experiments but also for compartment fires when timber surfaces are involved in the fire dynamics. Finally, the TiCHS-model was applied as an add-on to a zone-model. Proposals were suggested for future development to increase the model applicability. Show more
Permanent link
https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000483597Publication status
publishedExternal links
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Publisher
ETH ZurichSubject
Fire safety; Fire exposure; Timber structures; fire dynamics; EUROCODE (NORMEN FÜR DAS BAUWESEN); Combustion behaviourOrganisational unit
08809 - Frangi, Andrea (Tit.-Prof.)
Related publications and datasets
Is cited by: https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000289850
References: https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000475521
References: http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11850/285222
References: http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11850/359794
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