PREFACE

The last decades of the XX th century have seen important research endeavours devoted to the behaviour of building structures submitted to fire. This activity was particularly significant in Western Europe where numerous research reports, Ph.D. theses and scientific papers were published. Among the first internationally recognised codes of practice are, for steel elements, the recommendations of the ECCS "European Convention for Constructional Steelwork" (ECCS 1983) and, for concrete elements, the recommendations of the CEB/FIP "Comité Euro-International du béton / Fédération Internationale de la précontrainte" (CEB 1991).

The ambition that prevailed at the initiation of the Eurocodes was to publish a set of documents that would form a common basis for the design of structures made of various materials. This was also the aim of the fire parts of the Eurocodes when they were first presented in Luxemburg in 1990. These documents have since evolved from a code of practice to a more formal text when they were taken on board by the CEN "Comité Européen de Normalisation" and transformed first into ENV’s, or provisory European norms, in the mid 90’s, then more recently into EN’s, or European norms, in the first years of the XXI rst century.

During this evolutionary process, research activity kept going on and was accelerated by the knowledge that the Eurocodes would eventually end up in a more official and more permanent format as EN’s. It was desirable that as few questions as possible should remain unanswered when the final drafts of the Eurocodes were accepted. The Eurocode documents have therefore been significantly modified in the last few years and a lot of recent research results have been incorporated.

The resulting Eurocodes are nevertheless far from being useful textbooks, lecture notes or design guides. The necessary information to make a design can normally be found in the Eurocodes, but no more than that. An advantage is that the documents have ended up in a concise form. A disadvantage is that, for the reader who has not been involved in the research activity or in the drafting process, it is not always easy to find the relevant clauses, to discover the main design philosophy, to make interpretations when this is necessary, or to recognise the limits of application of the different rules. In other words, unless one has serious experience in the field, it is not very easy to make a real application of the Eurocode documents.

Fire sections have been written for the different Eurocodes for steel, concrete, composite steel-concrete, timber, masonry and aluminium. This book is limited to steel, and it is based on the stage 49 draft of Eurocode 3 issued in January 2005 (EN 1993-1-2: 2005), i.e. the text that has been officially accepted by the delegates of the member states, even if not yet officially published by CEN. Because the calculation of the fire resistance of a structure necessitates knowledge of the thermal environment created by the fire, reference will also be made to the sections of Eurocode 1 (EN1991-1-2: 2002) that describe fire actions.

This book is not a substitute for the complete text of Eurocode 3, EN 1993-1-2 . It provides background material and serves as a design guide for the user . The book should help a reader not familiar with the topic to make calculations of the fire resistance of steel structures according to the Eurocodes. This book will serve as an introductory guide to EN 1993-1-2. The theoretical, technical or historical background is provided when this helps the user to understand more clearly some of the rules of the text or some interpretations given by the authors. The book does not attempt to give all the theoretical background to every rule in the Standard. Not every rule or every clause will be reproduced here, only those required for understanding the text. The authors have included some worked examples on simple elements and some guidance showing how a complete structure can be analyzed.

The target audience for this book is professionals in civil engineering or architecture, students or teachers in these disciplines, and building officials and regulators. A good knowledge of mechanics of structures at room temperature is an essential background when reading this book and some knowledge of the design philosophy of the structural Eurocodes is an advantage.

Jean-Marc Franssen, Raul Zaharia

jm.franssen@ulg.ac.be

raul@constructii.west.ro

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