Structural behaviour of an open car park under real fire scenarios

Abstract During two successive European research projects involving CTICM (France), ARBED (Luxembourg) and TNO (Netherlands), several fire tests were performed on cars and on a real car park made of steel columns and steel beams connected to composite slabs. Although there has been a drastic increase of combustible product in cars, the experimental results have given convincing evidence that fire protection of the steel structure is not necessary to obtain overall stability. Parallel to the above experimental investigations, numerical analysis was also performed in which the fire development, the heating of the structure and structural behaviour during the fire were studied with different numerical models. However, the present paper focuses mainly on the modelling of structural behaviour. It shows that the global structural behaviour (composite floor and steel column) subjected to localized heating from cars may be very accurately predicted by 3D modelling in which the lateral buckling of the steel beam, the membrane and diaphragm effects of the floor are taken into account. In addition, the results of a parametric study are presented in which it is shown that the use of 3D modelling in the analysis leads to the possibility of building open car parks with more economical steel and concrete composite structures. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.