Fire Performance of Steel Reinforced Concrete Columns

Performance of steel reinforced concrete (SRC) columns under fire is investigated in this paper. A three-dimensional finite-element analysis (FEA) modeling is developed for sequentially coupled heat transfer and structural analysis, in which the classical creep strain and the transient strain of concrete together with thermal strain are included explicitly by subroutines. Four SRC columns with H-shaped steel and cross-shaped steel are experimentally investigated, and the test results are adopted to verify the FEA modeling. The FEA modeling is then used to construct the model of a typical full-scale SRC column and perform analysis to the behavior of the column in fire. Extensive parametric studies are performed to investigate the fire resistance of the SRC column, and the key influencing parameters are identified. Finally, a simplified calculation method is proposed to predict the fire resistance of the SRC column. (C) 2014 American Society of Civil Engineers.