Fire Performance Issues

The worldwide movement toward performance-based building codes is prompting the need for new computational methods to predict fire endurance of wood assemblies. Progress in the past twenty years in understanding fire endurance of individual solid wood components has been achieved in many different countries. The greatest opportunity for major advance in fire research is the development of computational fire endurance models that incorporate heat transfer, thermal degrade, and structural analysis algorithms for not only single components but multiple-component assemblies subject to standardized and natural fire scenarios. Full-scale test programs will also be needed to verify computational techniques and further deve!op thermal degradation theories. Why Fire Research is Needed Fire is a special design consideration addressed to minimize the risk of failure modes including structural collapse. Fire is not a loading condition in the traditional structural sense of applied forces, but instead an environmental condition that can have a dramatic impact on load carrying capacity and structure safety. The primary objective of fire resistant structural design is to maintain structural integrity during a fire for a sufficient period so that occupants may safely evacuate, fire fighters may safely extinguish the fire and to minimize property loss. This design process includes confining any potential fire with strategically-placed barriers and fire stops. Research on fire resistant design and construction in the United States appears to have diminished in recent years, although internationally it continues to be actively researched. In the U.S. fire resistant design receives much less research attention than similar efforts related to earthquake resistant design or the response of structures to wind events such as hurricanes. Can it 1 Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1415 Engineering Drive, Madison, Wisconsin 53706. 2 Supervisory Wood Scientist, USDA Forest Service, Forest Products Laboratory, One Gifford Pinchot Drive, Madison, WI 53705