Comparative fire analysis of steel-concrete composite buildings designed following performance-based and U.S. prescriptive approaches

Performance-based structural fire design provides a rational methodology for designing modern buildings with cost-effective solutions. However, in the United States, fire design still largely relies on design at the component level using prescriptive approaches. With performance-based approaches, there is an opportunity to benefit from increased flexibility and reduced cost in the design, but these advantages need to be explicitly described and disseminated to promote this shift in paradigm. In this paper, a comparative analysis is conducted on multi-story steel-concrete buildings designed following performance-based and U.S. prescriptive approaches. The steel-concrete composite structure allows taking advantage of tensile membrane action in the slab during fire, and therefore removing the fire protection on secondary beam elements. The nonlinear finite element software SAFIR is used to model the behavior of the buildings under the standard ASTM fire and a natural fire determined using the two-zone fire model CFAST. The numerical simulations show that performance-based design can be used to achieve the required level of safety currently enforced in the U.S. prescriptive guidelines, while providing an opportunity for cost reduction in fire protection material.