Ana Sauca

• Doctor of Engineering
• University of Liège

This paper describes the Guldborgsund arson house fire experiment performed in Denmark and the subsequent numerical investigation. Gas temperatures were measured with four thermocouple trees, and smoke detector activation times were recorded in all rooms. A two-step approach was used to perform the numerical modelling for reproduction of the fire s...

Tolerance gaps in wood connections are unavoidable, for reasons of constructability and the effects of natural shrinkage in timber elements with changing moisture content. During a fire, these gaps may lead to a substantial heat transfer to the metal connectors that are considered heat protected being embedded by the wooden components of the connec...

The analysis of the current state of fire statistics and data collection in Europe and other countries is needed to increase awareness of how fire incidents affect buildings and to support pan-European fire prevention and fire mitigation measures. The terminology and data collected regarding fire incidents in buildings in the EU Member States were...

A well-defined terminology of fire-related variables is important for correct analyses and supporting knowledge-based decisions regarding the evaluation of building fires at the European level. After developing an overview of current practices for fire statistics in Part I, the terminology used and the data collected by the EU Member States and eig...

Tolerance gaps or slips in wood connections are unavoidable, for reasons of constructability and the effects of natural shrinkage in timber elements with changing moisture content. During a fire, these gaps may lead to increased heat transfer through the connection. Aluminium connectors are becoming more popular due to their high malleability and a...

EU FireStat project brings together the knowledge and experience of nine different international fire safety institutions. The project maps the existing fire data collected across Member States and proposed meaningful data sets to allow decisions on fire safety at Member State and at EU level. This project was carried out by a consortium composed o...

Gypsum plasterboard walls are commonly used in constructions and they provide the passive fire protection as separating elements. The fire resistance of the wall is largely dependent on the thermo-mechanical properties of the gypsum plasterboard. Numerical modelling of the fire behaviour of gypsum plasterboard cracking, fall-off and gypsum induced...

This paper presents closed-form equations that were developed to evaluate critical temperatures of structural steel compression and tension members exposed to fire. The deterministic approach involved a parametric study using finite element simulations in order to identify influencing factors—for example, mechanical properties of steel, member slen...

Fire testing of large-scale structural prototypes is costly and requires highly specialized facilities. For this reason, most of the research on the structural response to fire loading relies on cheaper single-component experiments. However, such experiments do not reproduce the internal force redistribution in a realistic assembly, which plays a p...

This report presents the experimental investigation of a test fire in a large compartment of approximately 10 m wide, 7 m deep and 3.8 m high constructed in the National Fire Research Laboratory of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The test fire condition, controlled by heat release rate of natural gas as a fuel, thermal boundary...

The response of structural systems to fire loads is typically assessed through performing ‘standard’ fire tests on individual members under constant mechanical boundary conditions. Full scale tests showed different behavior compared to the standard tests, but remain impractical. A promising approach to predict the behavior of full scale tests throu...

Structural fire protection design in the United States is based on prescriptive fire-resistance ratings of individual load-bearing elements which are derived from standard fire testing, e.g. ASTM E119. In standard fire testing, a custom-built gas furnace is traditionally used to heat a test specimen by following the gas temperature-time curve presc...

As the structural engineering industry transitions towards performance based design methods, a better understanding of the performance of structures as full systems, especially under extreme loading conditions like fire, becomes a must. Full scale testing will provide such information, however, at an unrealistic cost. Hybrid Fire Testing (HFT) is i...

The response of structural systems to fire loads is typically assessed through performing 'standard' tests under constant mechanical boundary conditions. Such tests are usually performed on the individual elements. Full scale tests showed differences in their behavior compared to the behavior of the individual members tested in standard conditions....

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to propose a method for hybrid fire testing (HFT) which is unconditionally stable, ensures equilibrium and compatibility at the interface and captures the global behavior of the analyzed structure. HFT is a technique that allows assessing experimentally the fire performance of a structural element under real bou...

This paper describes a novel methodology for conducting stable hybrid fire testing (HTF). During hybrid fire testing, only a part of the structure is tested in a furnace while the reminded structure is calculated separately, here by means of a predetermined matrix. Equilibrium and compatibility at the interface between the tested “physical substruc...

Hybrid testing is an appealing technique to observe the behavior of an element in an experimental test while taking into account the interaction with the rest of the structure which is modelled numerically. Being widely used in the seismic field, this technique has been recently proposed in the fire field. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrat...

In this paper is presented the analysis of a concrete building exposed to OZone fire. The temperature development in the elements and the structural behaviour were calculated in SAFIR using beam elements for the columns and beams and shell elements for the floor slabs. The first floor was modelled and the effects of action from the upper storeys ar...