Feasibility of dimensionally reduced heat transfer analysis for structural members subjected to localised fire

Abstract

Considerable attention has been placed on the localised fire action in the structural fire safety engineering community. Localised fire action can be represented by a linear or exponential correlation between incident heat flux and radial distance. Society of Fire Protection Engineers proposes an exponential curve suitable for low fire load. Eurocode 1 suggests a combination of linear and exponential curves, which is suitable for high fire loads. This article discusses the feasibility of dimensional reduction for heat transfer analysis in structures subjected to realistic fires. The work has been presented to accurately estimate the error introduced by dimensional reduction under highly varying localised heat flux representative of the most non-uniform fire conditions in a building compartment. It is shown that beams and slabs can be adequately modelled with lower dimensional heat transfer analysis for most of the localised fire action.