Fire on prestressed reinforced concrete: CFD and FE thermo-mechanical simulation

In this paper, the case of a real structure damaged by fire is studied with the current computational mechanics methods. It is a prestressed RC industrial warehouse located in the outskirts of the city of Cagliari (Italy). The collected data of several post-fire assessment methods have been used as a benchmark for the Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) and Finite Element (FE) models. The first one presents an accurate description of the fire evolution and, consequently, of the maximum temperature distribution. The latter provides a good estimation of the mechanical behaviour of the reinforced concrete elements belonging to the structure. The numerical results are in good agreement with the field data confirming the accuracy of the simulation.