Numerical analyses for Performance-Based Fire Engineering (PBFE)

The aim of this paper is to highlight the application of performance approach to the fire design of a complex structure, such as an exhibition pavilion with concrete columns and reticular steel beams. In case of complex structures, the performance-based approach is more adequate then the traditional prescriptive approach. Analyses have been performed by means of a computational fluid dynamic computational code (Bennetsen 2008) FDS (McGrattan et al., 2009) in order to determine the action of fire over the structure in function of requested performance and for realistic scenarios.The action obtained has been applied to a Finite Element structural model through the program FEM Straus7/Strand7 (http://www.hsh.info/) in order to establish the structural behavior under fire action.