Fire resistance of axial restraint composite floor steel cellular beams

In a fire situation, axial restraint force can threaten the structural performance, but these influences do not appear in an isolated beam's furnace test. With this issue, the authors introduced an outer frame around the furnace to give a pin-end supports and axial restraint stiffness which can be controlled to set various restraint factors on the fire tested beam specimen. This paper presents three fire tests conducted on full scale composite Cellular Beams (CB) with different slab decking shapes subjected to vertical loading and axial restraint effect. As a result, temperatures, deflections, strain and displacement and failure mode are discussed to assess actual behaviour of the composite CB and compared with previous CB tests series which were conducted by the University of Ulster.