Timber Steel Fiber-Reinforced Concrete Floor Slabs in Fire: Experimental and Numerical Modeling

Timber-concrete composite floors represent an efficient possibility for strengthening timber beam ceilings and stiffening timber frame structures. The results of this construction method are higher stiffness and load bearing capacity, improved sound insulation, and better fire resistance. Replacing conventional RC with an innovative and efficient material, such as fiber RC, leads to improvements in the construction progress, material properties, and load transfer and to a reduction in the slab thickness. The subject of this paper is the numerical simulation of the behavior of composite timber-fiber concrete floor, consisting of a fiber concrete slab and timber beams. The primary point of this work is to explore the membrane action of the fiber concrete slab with timber beams and investigate the behavior of the load floor structure by using finite-element (FE) models. This paper presents a three-dimensional FE model developed to predict the mechanical behavior of timber-fiber concrete composite floors, to derive simpler models for representing the partially protected composite floors in fire. The analysis of these structures is nonlinear and considers the orthotropic behavior for timber and isotropic behavior for concrete. The description of the model, general parameters, and values are given in this paper. All modeling was prepared by using an FE software program. The numerical models are validated against the results of full-scale furnace, material property, push-out, and beam tests. (C) 2014 American Society of Civil Engineers.