Numerical analysis of structural concrete masonry small walls in fire

ABSTRACT

Structural masonry has been widely used in Brazil, especially during the last three decades. In its design process, it is also necessary to consider the thermal actions to ensure structural fire safety, since the elevated temperatures tend to decrease the mechanical properties of the materials. Brazilian standards do not include procedures for designing of structural masonry in fire. So designers usually apply foreign codes, which are based on parameters inherent of their respective countries. Considering these shortcomings, this work aimed to develop, by using the software ABAQUS, structural and thermo-structural numerical models of small walls composed of hollow concrete blocks, in order to evaluate their behaviour at both normal and high temperatures. Detailed micro-modeling strategy was applied, i.e., the numerical models were developed considering an individual representation of each concrete block and mortar joints, as well as the interface between them. Firstly, nonlinear analyses were performed with members under compression at room temperature, which results indicated good agreement with experimental tests available in literature. For the thermo-mechanical analyses, the elements were exposed to the standard fire proposed in ISO 834-1:1999 and four compression load levels (0% to 80% of their compression strength at normal temperature); variations related to boundary conditions were also tested, in order to obtain the fire resistance time for different situations. Considering members with 40% of compression load as a reference, the minimum fire resistance times resulting from the numerical analysis were about 70 and 59 minutes, according to the mechanical resistance and thermal insulation criteria, respectively. However, the results indicate that the fire resistance strongly depends of both mechanical loads and boundary conditions, with differences of up to 81% among the situations analysed.

Key-words
structural masonry; fire; numerical analysis; thermal analysis; thermo structural analysis