Structural Fire Analysis of Beams and Slabs Using ANSYS and FEAST Software Program

In recent years, building fire has become more frequent event and fire accidents have increased all over the world. Major problem with fire is it provides very less time to handle the situation and due to elevated temperature, reduction in strength of structural member with increase in fire exposure time has been observed. To evaluate this reduced strength of structural members and design for fire load, it is necessary to have the parameters such as fire load, fire exposure time and temperature variation across the structural members. In this paper, evaluation of fire load, equivalent time of exposure and temperature distribution of beams and slabs using finite element analysis software FEAST and ANSYS has been done. For temperature variation, transient heat thermal analysis, in which temperature is increasing continuously over the time, is used. For this analysis, beams and slabs are exposed to surface fire on different surfaces and the temperature distribution of cross section has been evaluated. The results are compared and found to be matching with the European Standard procedure.