| Abstract | A performance-based fire resistance evaluation method, called hybrid fire testing (HFT), was developed and carried out at the Fire Research Program of the National Research Council of Canada (NRC). HFT offers a more cost-effective approach to the assessment of the full structures performance in fire than that of a full-scale test and provides more reliable results than prescriptive single component testing. In the HFT method, the whole building is divided into two substructures; 1) the test specimen and 2) the model component. Then, fire performance of the whole structure is evaluated based on coupling the performance of the two substructures and by including their interactions in real time during the simulation. In this study, the HFT was applied for a 6-storey reinforced concrete building structure with a fire compartment scenario on the first floor. The test specimen was a worst-case scenario column in the compartment of fire origin in the building. The specimen was physically tested in a full-scale furnace, and the remaining of the building structure was modeled using numerical analysis software. In the HFT, the real time interactions between the two substructures are based not only on including the experimental results obtained from the test specimen into the numerical model component but most importantly also including feeding the output of the model component back into the test specimen environment (e.g. vertical and lateral loading changes). In other words, both equilibrium and compatibility conditions are satisfied between the test specimen and the model component. The results of this study show that the HFT is achievable and can be performed successfully for fire performance evaluation of a building structure. |
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