Enhancing the design of connections for fire resiliency

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Fire can lead to many structural damages for all materials, including steel. To ensure resiliency in a steel building, beam-column connections should be able to withstand the induced loading due to fire. To better understand the structural behaviour of these connections under fire with the final objective to ensure an optimized fire protection, finite element analysis (FEA) can be considered. Advanced FEA can supplement experimental data since full scale fire tests are expensive and difficult to be conducted. The current project will use the FEA software LS-DYNA to perform all analyses, since LS-DYNA is widely used in commercial projects in the consulting industry. First, a heat transfer analysis will be done followed by the cyclic loading analysis. The heat transfer analysis will consider different fire scenarios where subroutines in LS-DYNA will be developed into the explicit dynamic solver. The FEA will consider different thermal conductivity material properties for the steel to evaluate the examined fire protective materials. The FEA will focus on modeling three different connections that will vary in ductility (double angle, single angle and shear tab). The numerical results will evaluate different passive fire protection systems of the connections, e.g., spray-applied fire-resistive materials. The developed FEA models will consider heat dissipation and, based on the developed stresses and deformations after the fire scenarios, an optimal design that balances safety with economic and aesthetic specifications will be proposed. Finally, a framework will be developed to connect and update the initial design models from Revit with LS-DYNA. The analysis results aim to propose safe design by considering the reduction of the construction cost of steel structures. The goal of the proposed partnership is to significantly advance the state of knowledge related to an effective design of resilient steel connections of buildings when exposed thermal loadings and propose a safe design approach by considering reduction of the construction cost of such steel structures.