Heat transfer analysis of insulated steel member exposed to fire

Abstract

Heat transfer analysis of insulated steel members exposed to fire conditions is of essential importance in the realm of structure fire analysis to reap economic benefits from applying performance-based design approach. In general, heat transfer problems in 2D and 3D domain do not have closed form analytical solutions and recourse to a numerical procedure such as finite element method is necessary. With advancement in computer technology, numerical methods, especially the finite element method have been popularly adopted in temperature analysis for structure fire design. A computer code in C++ language has been developed in this project. The validity has been checked against a set of benchmark examples. The verified computer program has been extended for temperature calculations of insulated steel member under fire conditions, in particular, the standard ISO fire.