Panagiotis Kotsovinos

The behaviour of steel beam-to-column connections under thermal loading is understudied. When exposed to a fire, the members within steel structures expand during heating and contract during cooling, inducing potentially large connection forces. Within Canadian design, there exists flexibility for designers to consider more advanced computational p...

The cavities in a building facade can significantly increase the fire hazard, acting as pathways and accelerators for the vertical spread of flames and smoke, even in non-combustible facades. Ensuring fire safety during facade design requires a thorough understanding of how cavity geometry influences fire dynamics. However, established theories for...

This research focuses on the determination of the stability of a stadium roof structure when a fire occurs to permit timely egress of the occupants. To achieve this objective, a series of experiments were conducted on isolated steel truss systems. The first included testing two small-scale truss systems over a localized, methanol pool fire, designe...

There is little doubt that masonry walls have, throughout the history of mankind, been a critical part of building construction. From this standpoint, the present study aims to unfold the thermal behaviour of masonry walls when subjected to the standard cellulosic curve prescribed in ISO 834. Particular attention has been paid on temperature variat...

With architectural styles changing and the knowledge of fire behaviour constantly evolving, it is important to continue advancing the field of fire safety engineering to ensure that the existing and expanding infrastructure is safe and resilient. Within the National Building Code of Canada and subsequent provincial and material design standards, th...

The use of prefabricated elements is widely adopted in the construction sector to reduce the necessary on-site construction works and time, to maximise efficiency in material use and to mitigate on-site fabrication and assembly errors. The established use of such methodologies necessitates ongoing investigation and improvement of their performance...

Fires are increasingly recognized as one of the major hazards causing damage to bridges and disruption in their operational continuity. As a transportation hub, cable-supported bridges are particularly critical to social sustainability and economic development. However, ensuring the resilience of cable-supported bridges in unexpected fire events ha...

The use of mass timber in construction is becoming a compelling option when faced with the high carbon footprint of traditional concrete and steel production. However, fire safety standards are yet to evolve to support these designs. Encapsulation is commonly used to protect all, or some, of the timber surfaces and reduce the risks introduced. This...

Fires involving the facade of a building are a modern and complex problem. Previous reviews on fire safety of facades have addressed flammability and fire spread, but these are not the only hazards. Mechanical failure can cause portions of the facade to fall out, threatening people evacuating and emergency personnel, and causing damage at lower hei...

The use of mass timber in buildings instead of non‐combustible materials has benefits in sustainability, aesthetics, construction times, and costs. However, the uptake of mass timber in modern construction for medium and high‐rise buildings is currently hindered by uncertainty regarding safety and structural performance in fire. We attribute this t...

Structural cables are used to design critical bridge structures. These are not typically redundant; a loss or compromise of a few cables can lead to the progressive collapse. Previous experimental research has shown that the degradation of material properties and thermal expansion of structural cables is more onerous than the standard carbon prestr...

The desire by developers and architects to build mass timber buildings using cross laminated timber (CLT) and glulam has significantly increased globally in the last decade due to its benefits with regards to sustainability as well as other architectural and commercial drivers. This paper presents novel experimental evidence from CodeRed #02, the s...

There is an increasing global demand to build from timber as it is a sustainable and attractive material. One of the key challenges associated with timber buildings is their performance in a fire, in particular, for medium‐ and high‐rise buildings and when timber is exposed. Research on this topic to date has been performed in compartments smaller...

This chapter discusses the advanced analysis of structures in fire. It is aimed at practitioners and researchers in the field of structural fire engineering who aim at explicitly predicting the response of a structure in the fire situation, as opposed to following a prescriptive design method. The first section presents the basics of advanced analy...

The traditional design fires commonly considered in structural fire engineering, like the standard fire and Eurocode parametric fires, were developed several decades ago based on experimental compartments smaller than 100 m ² in floor area. These experiments led to the inherent assumption of flashover in design fires and that the temperatures and b...

Prestressing steel is commonplace in critical infrastructure like bridges. These structures are of significant societal and economic importance, and any disruptions affecting their service due to fire or other extreme events, can compromise life safety, structural integrity, and the economic cycle. The prestressing steel used in bridge infrastructu...

There are no contemporary code requirements for the fire resistance of bridge infrastructure, nor is there guidance available for practitioners who wish to design cable-supported structures for the fire. This research seeks to develop an understanding of the thermal response of steel stay-cables under exposure to a pool fire. Multiple varieties of...

This paper is proposing an machine learning based expert system for preliminary prediction of the insulation fire resisting performance of shallow floor systems when subject to exposure to the ISO 834 Standard Fire Curve. The proposed system is a digital tool which incorporates a machine learning algorithm trained on the outcomes of pre-run two-dim...

p>Recent trends towards performance-based fire designs for complex and critical structures have posed questions about the fire resilience of bridge infrastructure. There are little-to-no code requirements for bridge fire resistance and practitioner guidance on the subject is limited. Research on the fire performance of cable-supported bridge struct...

p>The performance-based fire protection design of cable-supported bridge structures is becoming more common as stakeholders desire more resilient infrastructure. Currently, there exist significant knowledge gaps regarding the fire performance of structural steel cables. The study herein examines the thermal response of several varieties of unloaded...

Structural cables are widely used on large-scale structures such as bridges and stadia around the world. This paper presents a review of current research and development associated with the thermal and mechanical performance of structural cables when subjected to fire loading. The findings of this study highlight key knowledge gaps, which are subse...

In structures where columns are not continuous along the height of a building the loads are usually transferred via transfer beams. As a result, these beams are subject to larger shear forces and bending moments in comparison to standard beams. Transfer beams are typical in modern construction, especially high-rise building; commonly arising to ach...

Timber is an innovative and sustainable construction material, but its uptake has been hindered by concerns about its performance in a fire. Current building regulations measure the fire performance of timber using the metric of fire resistance tests. In these tests, the charring rate is measured under a series of heat exposures (design fires) and...

Structures need to be designed to maintain their stability in the event of a fire. The travelling fire methodology (TFM) defines the thermal boundary condition for structural design of large compartments of fires that do not flashover, considering near field and far field regions. TFM assumes a near field temperature of 1200°C, where the flame is i...

Modern architecture is striving for large open spaces, which has resulted in the development of design methodologies such as the Improved Travelling Fires Methodology (iTFM). This methodology is only applicable in large open spaces where flashover may not occur. This paper studies the effect of various design fires, including traditional uniform fi...

Cable-supported structures such as bridges and stadia are critical for the surrounding community and the consequences arising from a major fire event can be substantial. Previous computational studies into the thermal response of cables often employed simplistic heat transfer models that assumed lump capacitance or cross-sectional homogeneity witho...

Resilient design requires information about a structure’s response to a variety of exposures such that systems can be implemented to prevent unacceptable losses. For the case of critical infrastructure like bridges, losses associated with structural damage and traffic closures from fire events can be substantial. Despite this, there are no specific...

Structural fire design, until recently, has only assumed uniform fires inside the compartment, and the assessment of structural failure has been often based on a critical temperature criterion. While this criterion, to some extent, may be able to indicate the temperature at which the structural element is near to failure, it is based on standard fi...

Structural softwood (timber) recently gained attention by architects and engineers as a construction material for high-rise buildings. Regulations restrict the height of these buildings due to safety concerns as their fire behaviour is poorly understood. The fire behaviour and loss of loadbearing capacity of timber is controlled by charring, whose...

Most of the current understanding of building behaviour in fire is based on the adoption of the standard and parametric temperature-time fire curves. However, these design fires are based on small scale tests and idealize the thermal environment as uniform. Thus, they have important limitations on their applicability to large enclosures. Instead, i...

Due to the complex nature of structural response in fire, computational tools are often necessary for the safe design of structures under fire conditions. In recent years, use of the finite element code LS-DYNA has grown considerably in research and industry for structural fire analysis, but there is no benchmarking of the code available in the fir...

During previous fire events such as the World Trade Centre Towers (WTC) 1, 2 & 7 in New York (2001), the Windsor Tower in Madrid (2005), and the Plasco building in Iran (2017), flames were observed to travel horizontally across the floor plate and vertically to different floors. Such fires are not considered as part of the traditional prescriptive...

A bridge is community critical infrastructure and, therefore, the consequences arising from extensive structural damage or extended unavailability due to a fire on or beneath it could be significant. This paper presents the hazard assessment process for the characterisation of the threat to a bridge from potential fires beneath it. The hazard asses...

Bridges are community critical infrastructure and, therefore, the consequences arising from extensive structural damage due to a fire on the bridge could be significant. This paper presents the process for the characterisation of the design fires on a bridge deck utilised to assess the thermal and mechanical response of a cable-stayed bridge struct...

This paper demonstrates the need for structural fire engineering in the design and specification of unusual structural arrangements. It is found that the required fire resistance of a structure cannot necessarily be achieved by considering only the fire resistance of individual elements of structure. A case study of columns that have a change of di...

This paper considers the effect of perimeter column angle-of-inclination on the structural response of tall buildings subject to fire. The purpose of the study is to aid designers when doing structural fire assessments of tall buildings. The consequences of column angle-of-inclination and its interaction with the floorplate are examined. It has bee...

The traveling fire methodology provides more realistic fire scenarios for structural fire design by considering fire dynamics in large compartments which are beyond the validity or scope of conventional structural fire design codes. This novel methodology developed recently elsewhere has been implemented in the OpenSees software framework. In this...

Computational modeling of structures subjected to extreme static and dynamic loads (such as snow, wind, impact, and earthquake) using finite-element software are part of mainstream structural engineering curricula in universities (at least at graduate level), and many experts can be found in industry who routinely undertake such analyses. However,...

The last decades have seen a surge in the construction of tall buildings all over the world. Due to their, often, innovative and complex layouts, tall buildings can pose unique challenges to architects and engineers. Previous tall building failures raised significant concerns on the applicability of prescriptive fire design for these structures. Th...

Many previous tall building fires demonstrate that despite code compliant construction fires often spread vertically and burn over multiple floors at the same time. The collapses of the WTC complex buildings in 9/11 as well as other partial collapses like the ones of the Windsor Tower in Madrid and of the Technical University of Delft building pose...

The collapse of the World Trade Center buildings on September 11, 2001 posed questions on the stability of tall buildings in fire. Understanding the collapse of the WTC Towers offers the opportunity to learn useful engineering lessons in order to improve the design of future tall buildings against fire induced collapse. This paper extends previous...

This study examines the stability behaviour of structures under thermal loading using the recently extended open source and object-oriented framework OpenSees. In this study a dynamic approach was followed and it is shown through numerical examples that this approach can efficiently model structures under thermal loading experiencing sudden bucklin...

OpenSees is an open source object oriented software framework developed at UC Berekeley and currently supported by PEER and Nees. OpenSees has so far been focussed on providing an advanced computational tool for analysing the non-linear response of structural frames subjected to seismic excitations. Given that OpenSees is open source (available for...