FIRECAT: FIre REsearch CATalogue of Mass Timber Compartment Tests with Arwa Abougharib, MSc
📍Video Conference 🕖12:00 PM – 1:00 PM MST 👤2 Attendees
Loaded structural members made of exposed mass timber can be designed to survive the fully developed phase of a compartment fire using reduced cross-section calculations. Experimentally, however, exposed timber members are prone to unexpected collapse for several hours into the cooling phase of the fire. This is due to timber's low thermal conductivity, the significant loss of its mechanical properties with moderate temperature rise, and the insulating effect of the char layer formed during the fire, which then impedes efficient heat loss to the environment during the cooling phase. The post-fire collapse of exposed timber poses a challenge for timber structures that require unlimited burnout resistance, such as tall buildings. Therefore, a performance-based design approach that accounts for timber’s continued weakening in the cooling phase is required for proper sizing.Performance-based modelling tools, whether physics-based (e.g., Finite Element) or data-driven (e.g., machine learning), developed for exposed mass timber will require datasets for calibration, validation, and testing. A substantial amount of solid-phase temperature data is publicly available from mass timber compartment burns, but are hardly being utilized beyond the individual needs of each study. A cross-study meta-analysis of solid temperature data in timber compartments has the potential to unlock design insights and to provide benchmarks for new timber thermal models. Until now, such meta-analysis was not possible due to the difficulty of meaningfully comparing solid temperatures across highly disparate and heterogeneous experiments.This presentation will introduce FIRECAT: FIre REsearch CATalogue of mass timber compartment tests, a database whose unique data structure would permit a historical meta-analysis of solid temperatures, support future thermal model development, and act as a reporting standard for future experimental campaigns involving exposed mass timber.
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