Numerical Prediction of the Fire Resistance of Pretensioned Structural Elements

Abstract

Aim: The main aim of this paper is to present a computational approach to modelling pretensioned concrete structures subjected to mechanical loads and fire temperature. The work focuses on the comparison between results of calculations obtained for explicit and implicit approaches to the modelling of high temperature rheological effects, i.e. transient creep of concrete and creep of reinforcing and prestressing steel. A simple method for the extraction of creep strains from Eurocode 2 stress-strain relations is proposed. Numerical simulations of two types of structures were performed: the pretensioned one-way slab heated from below and pretensioned three-face heated beams.Methods: The presented approach includes one- and two-dimensional thermal analyses at the cross-section level and a one-dimensional mechanical analysis (beam element) at the structural level – 2Dθ+1DM model. The secant stiffness approach was applied in the numerical simulations in order to take into account changes in the stiffness of the structure resulting from the thermal degradation of material parameters and development of rheological deformations. Thermal and mechanical fields were calculated using the finite element method. Results: The results of calculations were compared with the experiments available in the literature. It was observed that a better agreement between calculations and tests was obtained if the creep of steel was modelled using the explicit approach. The analysis of the heating time / maximum deflection diagrams shows that the implicit model of steel leads to a more rigid response of the structure in comparison to the explicit approach.Conclusions: The presented numerical analysis based on the secant stiffness approach is able to reproduce the behaviour of pretensioned concrete elements subjected to mechanical and thermal loads. The explicit high temperature creep models provide results that are in a better agreement with experiments than the outcomes of the implicit approach. The implicit creep model of prestressing steel also overestimates the fire resistance of the analysed structures. It should be noted, however, that this overestimation is not very important from the practical point of view

Keywords

• transient creep of concrete
• creep of steel
• fire resistance
• pretensioned concrete