Speaker
Description
Wood's rise in popularity as a construction material is driven by its positive environmental impact and favorable material properties, such as its high strength-to-mass ratio, low thermal conductivity, and renewable nature. This shift towards wood as a construction material is a response to concerns over the carbon footprint and environmental harm caused by traditional materials like steel and concrete.
A good performance of timber structural members must be demonstrated in fire situation. To perform numerical simulations of timber structures in fire, EN1995-1-2 provides thermal properties of wood for computing the temperature distribution. These properties have been determined considering the standard ISO834 time-temperature curve.
The aim of the exploratory research was to verify whether these properties are also valid for other thermal conditions, either more severe or less severe than the standard curve, particularly during the cooling phase of a real fire.
In the tests performed in the fire laboratory of Liege University, timber samples were subjected on one side to a given heat flux of different intensities, including decreasing phases. Time-temperature curves inside the timber elements were recorded by thermo-couples inserted at different distances from the exposed side.
Using SAFIR software, dedicated to the analysis of structures under elevated temperatures, these curves were recalculated with the thermal properties provided by EN1995-1-2. The comparison emphasized that the correspondence is not satisfactory. By adapting the real laboratory conditions within the numerical simulations, and by changing the thermal properties of the wood, a better reproduction of the experiments was obtained.
The exploratory research demonstrated that further research must be performed to propose adapted thermal properties of wood within EN1995-1-2, in order to provide conservative results when real fires are considered in the design of timber structures
| Topics | Fire engineering |
|---|---|
| Keywords | Wood, Thermal properties, Real fires, Numerical simulations, Fire tests |
