A simple method for combining fire and structural models and its application to fire safety evaluation

To consider the actual fire characteristics in the fire response analysis of building structures and to simplify the complex relationship between the fire analysis model and the structural finite element analysis model, a spatio-temporal model of the fire temperature and heat flux boundary for heat conduction analysis is developed. The proposed model adopts a two-way orthogonal polynomial approach for fitting the discrete data from the fire simulation and obtains continuous spatial polynomial equations. It is shown to be accurate for capturing the distributions of temperature and heat flux that are required for a heat conduction analysis and a thermal mechanical coupling analysis. Finally, the model is implemented through user-subroutines UTEMP and DFLUX in ABAQUS, and it is applied to a new archive in Beijing. The results show that this method may be used to combine fire simulation and structural analysis for the safety evaluation of structures under fire.