FEA of a Reinforced Concrete Tunnel under Fire Conditions

Fire risk verification of tunnel sections of a railway tunnel located in Florence

ABSTRACT

Fire performance evaluation is fast becoming an important part of the overall structural performance assessment and is assuming an increasing role within international standards.

Simple approaches, based on single section performance, often fail to give a realistic description of the phenomenon.

This is especially so in the case of statically indeterminate structures, where thermo-mechanical coupling and nonlinear dependency of stress, moduli and expansion need to be accounted for. In our study, which was carried out in conjunction with engineers from SWS Engineering in Trento, we investigated modeling techniques that could be applied to fire analysis of reinforced concrete tunnels.