Fire design of concrete structures - materials, structures and modelling

This publication is intended to provide guidelines rather than just data on the influence of fire on concrete and concrete structures. Therefore, the data published in herein are a selected number for the purpose of supporting interpretation and the flow of concepts. The guidelines presents a general brief outline of the effect of fire on both concrete material and concrete structures with emphasis being placed upon the important developments in the past few years, namely: (a) the increasing use of high performance concrete (HPC) in buildings, tunnels and bridges; (b) the growing acceptance of the use of performance based fire engineering calculations for the structural analysis and design against fire; (c) the problem of, and solutions to, explosive spalling; and (d) fires in tunnels - an issue of very high profile in recent years. This technical note is not intended to be an exhaustive review of the effect of fire on concrete and concrete structures, nor present a database of properties at high temperature. There are numerous publications on the subject - covering both materials and structures – in journals, conference proceedings, books [BAZ 96], [ANC 86], [SHI 87], [BUC 01], [KHO 06] and the work of the Rilem Committees [SCH 86], [SCH 90]. Instead, the main aims of this document are to present recent trends and developments, highlight key influencing factors, bring together holistically the disparate but related issues in one short document, highlight the deficiencies in current practice and point to the future. The basic principles of performance based codes and fire engineering are also presented on the assumption that the reader is not a specialist in this field.