In the past two decades, timber building has gained attraction in the construction industry due to its sustainability. In parallel to this, ensuring fire safety has become an important part of the design process. A realistic assessment of the fire performance of a structural system requires modeling actual fire scenarios. In addition, the interaction of structural members under fire conditions is important to accurately estimate the level of fire performance and fire protection needed. Fire safety design objectives of non-standard timber buildings, which include tall structures, can essentially deviate from the prescriptive design approach. Enforcing the latter approach can result in an uneconomical and less efficient solution, and it can fail to deliver a quantifiable measure of the level of building reliability under different fire scenarios. This research thus addresses the application of fire performance-based design (PBD) for timber buildings. It involves analyzing and testing different solutions to achieve a target performance. To help assess the global vulnerability of timber structures under fire, a framework is adopted from the multi-hazard PBD framework. The framework is based on the triple-integral framework used in performance-based earthquake engineering (PEER). 

High-fidelity modeling will be carried out in ABAQUS software to calibrate structural joints. Realistic fire scenarios are then considered on the innovative timber structural systems developed recently by the team. This framework involves conducting heat transfer analysis and thermo-mechanical analysis considering fire compartments that are critical to the overall fire performance of a structural system. The design fires are derived considering the fuel load and ventilation factors to account for the randomness in the development of fire as per EN 1991-1-2.  The global probability of the collapse of the timber structural systems can then be estimated by combining fragility curves derived from each compartment fire. This project deals with the cost-effectiveness of providing fire protection to structural members, optimizing the quantity and location of its application.

Reference:

Tesfamariam, S. (2022). Performance-based design of tall timber buildings under earthquake and wind multi-hazard loads: Past, present, and future. Frontiers in Built Environment, 8:848698.