An Experimental Study on the H-Beam Under Fire Load in Open Space

Abstract

The fire safety assessment procedure of ships and offshore structures can be briefly described as a procedure for assessing safety by defining fire loads according to accident scenarios and analyzing their effects on the structure. In general, safety is reviewed via the temperature criteria of the structures under fire loads, and it is assessed in more detail via thermal-structural analysis, which combines fire simulation-heat transfer analysis with structural analysis in the design stage. Therefore, the accuracy of the thermal-structural analysis is crucial for reliable fire safety assessment, and the most applied method for validating the accuracy is to compare with the experimental results.Although fire experiments have been conducted by many researchers to analyze the characteristics of flames and heat transfer of steel members, constructing the temperature-dependent material property data, verifying the fire resistance performance of the structure itself, developing and validating numerical models, including other experiments have been conducted from the perspective of fluids with a primary focus on measuring gas and steel surface temperatures. On the other hand, fire experiments from the perspective of structure, which measure the displacement of a structure under fire load, were conducted mainly in limited environments such as inside a furnace because it was difficult to measure displacement in a high-temperature environment with a mixture of flames and smoke, as well as controlling the heat of the fire source. In addition, fire experiments conducted in open space have been seldom carried out. The British Steel Corporation (BSC) has summarized standard fire experiment results for structures such as steel beams and columns (Wainman and Kirby, 1988;Wainman et al., 1990). Cong conducted a furnace fire experiment on an I-beam, which is widely used as structural members for offshore structures, under mechanical loads to measure the steel surface temperature and vertical displacement. The vertical displacement was then measured by linear variable differential transformers (LVDTs) installed on top of the specimen exposed to the exterior parts of the furnace (Cong et al., 2005). The results obtained from this experiment have been widely used by other researchers to develop numerical analysis techniques (Kim, 2014;Kim et al., 2017).In addition to steel, fire experiments have also been conducted on sandwich panel structures made of fiber-reinforced plastic (FRP)

Numerical Validation of the Two-Way Fluid-Structure Interaction Method for Non-Linear Structural Analysis under Fire Conditions

“…A fire experiment on an H-beam commonly used for structural reinforcement in ships and offshore platforms was conducted to obtain data for verification of the thermalstructural analysis technology [29]. The H-beam was 4.20 m in length with a cross-section of 0.10 m (flange) × 0.15 m (web), a 4.90-mm-thick flange and a 4.30-mm-thick web.…”

“…The T g , steel surface temperature and vertical displacement during combustion were measured. Figure 5 shows the experimental setup [29].…”

“…To improve the numerical approach of a two-way FSI for non-linear structural analysis in a propane burner fire, several simulations were conducted and compared with the experimental results of an H-beam. The aims of this study were to (i) perform FSI analysis of an H-beam under a propane burner fire through one-way and two-way analyses, and to then compare the results with experimental data [29], (ii) compare the results of these CFD techniques are a common strategy in fire safety engineering to calculate the multiphysical interactions that occur during a fire [11]. CFD enables fire modeling by solving the basic conservation equations of mass, energy and momentum and using accurate three-dimensional (3D) topological models of structures [7].…”

“…To improve the numerical approach of a two-way FSI for non-linear structural analysis in a propane burner fire, several simulations were conducted and compared with the experimental results of an H-beam. The aims of this study were to (i) perform FSI analysis of an H-beam under a propane burner fire through one-way and two-way analyses, and to then compare the results with experimental data [29], (ii) compare the results of these analyses, depending on the ∆t in two-way analysis and (iii) propose an appropriate ∆t for two-way FSI analysis.…”

Fracture Estimation in Ship Collision Analysis—Strain Rate and Thermal Softening Effects

“…Assessments of the resistance of ship and offshore structural components subjected to extreme and accidental loadings, such as collision and grounding [1], explosion and blast accompanied with fire [2,3], and slamming [4], are impact engineering problems. Under impact loads, the structural response may differ considerably from that under a quasi-static load [5] because the mechanical properties are affected significantly by the loading speed and resulting strain rates.…”