Degradation of Out-of-plane Initial Stiffness of Steel-concrete Walls Exposed to Fire

Steel-concrete (SC) walls, as a main lateral resisting system in nuclear power plants, have serious fire resistance problem because of their exposed steel faceplates. The out-of-plane stiffness of SC walls will degrade when exposed to fire, which has significant influence on the mechanical performance of the composite walls and even the whole structure. In this paper, a finiteelement (FE) model was developed to simulate thermo-mechanical coupling behavior of SC walls exposed to fire. One conducted ISO-834 standard fire test and two reported thermal and mechanical loading tests were assembled to verify the developed FE model. Based on the validated FE model, numerical experiments of 15 SC walls in fire exposure durations of 0~3 h were conducted to investigate the effect of steel arrangement and geometrical size on the out-of-plane initial stiffness of SC walls under elevated temperatures. Numerical results indicate that the out-of-plane initial stiffness of SC walls under ambient temperature is mainly influenced by steel faceplate thickness and section depth, while the initial stiffness degradation under elevated temperature is mainly influenced by fire exposure duration or surface temperature of exposed steel faceplate. Then, two equations were proposed to predict the out-of-plane initial stiffness of SC walls exposed to fire. The predicted results agree well with the test and numerical results, which demonstrates that the proposed equations can be used to estimate the damage of SC walls in fire.