Structural Fire Performance of Fiber Reinforced HSC Columns Using Opensees Software

Abstract

Fire testing / fire performance evaluation of reinforced concrete structures is a time, effort and resource heavy discourse. Analytical approach to establish fire resistance rating and fire performance of reinforced concrete (RC) structures is a viable alternative and helps to simulate the fire response of structures. OpenSees (Open System for Earthquake Engineering Simulation) is an object oriented software framework used to create finite element applications and then simulate the response of structural systems subjected to earthquake. The OpenSees developers group in School of Engineering, University of Edinburgh have successfully conducted the research to add structures-in-fire modelling capability into the OpenSees framework by utilizing its well-designed software architecture (Jiang, Jiang, Kotsovinos, Zhang, Usmani, McKenna and Li, 2013). By adopting object-oriented programming paradigm, the software structure is consistent with that of OpenSees, which made it possible to reuse some of the existing components of software whereby introducing fire related components in it. At present, the use of high performance concrete (HPC) is becoming more popular due to the improvements in structural performance such as high strength and durability that it can provide compared to conventional NSC (Kodur and Dwaikat, 2008). However, OpenSees modeling module lacks material properties of many concrete types such as High Performance Concrete (HPC) and Fiber Reinforced Concrete (FRC). Thus, there is a dire need to incorporate such material properties in existing OpenSees Software and make it a more versatile tool to simulate behavior of all types of concrete infrastructures.