Fire safety analysis

This module requires the license “Fire safety analysis“.
Fire safety analysis in Diamonds is only supported for bars in concrete and/or steel. Timber is not supported.

A fire load will result in an increase the temperature of the cross-section. A thermal response analysis will compute this increase over time. To run a thermal response analysis:

• Click . The following dialogue appears:

• At the top, there are two tab pages: ‘FEM solver’ and ‘Analytical solver’.
  Diamonds will determine automatically whether a section should be calculated using the analytical solver or FEM solver with following scheme.
  • FEM solver
    • will be solved with FEM (Finite Element Method)
    • is adequate for massive cross-section (usually in concrete)
  • Analytical solver
    • will be solved with the formulas of EN 1993-1-2
    • is adequate for slender cross-sections (always in steel)

• If there are multiple bars with a fire load, they will be grouped per cross-section with underneath the different boundary conditions.
• The section borders marked in red are coated with a fire protected material (other than a fire resistant paint). The yellow zones indicates where the fire is present.
• An internal algorithm will calculate an appropriate mesh. The proposed values are in most of the cases just fine, so you don’t need to alter it. Only for cross-sections with a lot of difference between the width of the parts, you could decide to adjust the mesh in order to obtain a proper distributed net.
• You can convert an analytical case to an FEM case (and vise versa) by dragging the profile by its name to the desired solver. But:
  • The analytical solver is not adequate to calculate massive sections!
  • Not all FEM cases can be converted to an analytical case and the other way around. If it is not possible to convert, Diamonds will display a message.

• Click to stop the calculations.

Read in this article how to do a fire design.