An approach for evaluating the residual strength of fire exposed bridge girders

A streamlined framework for calculating the response of steel-supported bridges to open-air tanker truck fires

“…To incorporate additional fire characteristics, parametric "design fire" curves, which incorporate a decay phase and fire duration, have also been used to assign a temperature time history for exposed structural elements. Several studies have compared the performance of bridges subjected to the standard hydrocarbon fire curves with other parametric or empirical temperature time histories that represent more realistic fire growth and decay [11,12]. All of these simplified methods are predicated on the assumption that the surface temperature of the structural elements is the same as the fire's temperature time history -this procedure avoids the need for a heat transfer calculation that accounts for the standoff or orientation of the structure to the fire.…”

Behavior of steel bridge girders under fire conditions

“…The response of structural members in bridges under fire conditions can be significantly different than those in buildings due to different fire scenarios, load level, support conditions, and sectional characteristics that are present in bridges [4]. Therefore, fire provisions used for building elements might not be directly applicable to bridge elements.…”

“…A detailed literature review further reveals that there is a lack of understanding on the behavior of steel bridge girders exposed to fire [4,13,19,20]. To develop such an understanding, experimental and numerical studies on the fire performance of steel bridge girders are being carried out as part of a collaborate research project between Michigan State University and Princeton University.…”

Enhancing Fire Resistance of Steel Bridge Girders Using External Fire Insulation

“…Therefore, the fire safety information that is specially established for structural members in buildings might not be applied directly for bridge structural members. There is only limited research that has been carried out on fire resistance of structural members of bridges [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. Most of these studies focused on assessing fire response of steel bridge, while very few of these studies aimed to enhance the fire resistance of steel bridge girders [2,12].…”