Performance-Based Structural Fire Safety

The ability to understand the performance of building structures under fire exposure and to make informed engineering design decisions based on analysis rather than simply applying prescriptive codes is a growing area of interest. This paper summarizes recent research and provides a possible approach to integrating fire safety engineering into the design process for structural framing systems. Performance-based design of fire-safe structures is defined in terms of five activities, and a series of flowcharts organizes these activities in terms of sublevel functions and their interrelationships. The flowcharts also help to identify informational needs critical to performance-based structural fire safety and to develop an understanding of the role of the fire protection engineer.