Progressive Methods for Determining the Fire Resistance of Wooden Beams

The role of the construction system of each building is to transfer the loading to its foundations. During its lifetime, the building is exposed to the effects of permanent and accidental loads, which also include fire loading. The fire poses a great threat to the users of the building, because in addition to the direct adverse effects on health, it can lead to the collapse of the entire building, and thus endanger persons in or near the building. Therefore, ensuring the fire safety of the building is extremely important. The time to achieve buildings failure due to fire is presented as the value of fire resistance, which in wooden structural elements exposed to fire depends on the rate of charred layer formation and the residual cross section, which is capable to transfer the loading. The process of forming the char layer must be considered whenever wood surfaces or wood-based panels are directly exposed to fire. Eurocodes 1–9 are used to determine the value of fire resistance, which allow the use of simple ones and advanced computational models. Simple computational models can be used to analyse construction products or structural elements. They represent a series of different numerical calculations of structures transformed from a three-dimensional model to a two-dimensional one or small-scale or medium-scale fire resistance tests. Two methods can be used to calculate the fire resistance of the entire building. The first is the division of the building into structural elements and the calculation of fire resistance using simple computational models. The second method involves the use of advanced computational models to determine the value of fire resistance of the entire building. The calculations of fire resistance of structural elements are becoming more and more complicated, with which the probability of occurrence of errors in the calculations also increases. Computer-aided modelling based on finite element analysis (FEA) is offered as a suitable alternative but extensive research is still needed to collect suitable input data. This scientific monograph deals with the assessment of the computer aided fire modelling and simulation suitability for determining the fire resistance of structural elements, in particular the wooden beams made of Silver fir (lat. Abies alba) and Norway spruce (lat. Picea abies) wood.