Fire in reinforced concrete structures and investigation of non-linear behaviours of these structures exposed to fire

It is known that reinforced concrete structures are exposed to fires and, mostly becoming out of service, may cause life and property losses. However, in our country, the sources to enable fire situations to be taken into account in designs are not enough. In recent years, some foreign standards have been translated into Turkish. But, in order to use these standards in designing reinforced concrete structures according to fire, doing more scientific investigations has become unavoidable.The main purpose of this study is to investigate the fire and fire safety in the reinforced structures and non-linear behaviour of these structures exposed to fires. For this purpose, this study consists of three chapters and three appendixes. The first chapter is composed of literature review about fire safety and fire performance of reinforced concrete structures. In the second chapter, fire behaviour models, the thermal and mechanical properties of concrete and reinforcement, fire spalling of concrete, thermal analysis methods of reinforced concrete cross-sections, and structural analysis methods of reinforced concrete structures exposed to fire have been covered. In addition, the related formulations of computer programs developed by using finite element method, numerical examples carried out by means of the developed programs and SAFIR computer program, the results of these examples, and discussions are given in this chapter. Conclusions drawn from this study and recommendations are summarized in chapter three, and this chapter is followed by the list of references and three appendices which are related to the codes of EPY, ISILSEYBA2, and YNGSEYBA2 computer programs.The results obtained show that it is necessary to use more advanced methods in addition to prescriptive and simplified methods which are proposed by the standards in order to determine the fire performance of reinforced concrete structures. Additionally, the results also imply that the developed ISILSEYBA2 and YNGSEYBA2 computer programs can be used for 2-D non-linear thermal and structural analyses of reinforced concrete structures exposed to fire with acceptable accuracy.