FIRE RESISTANCE DESIGN OF JAPANESE TRADITIONAL FLOOR-BEAM ASSEMBLIES BASED ON THE PREDICTION OF BENDING STRESS IN THE TIMBER BEAM – AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY

Assessment of the mechanical fire safety performance of Japanese traditional floor-beam assemblies is conducted by predicting the post-fire bending stress of timber beams and validated by full scale 45minutes furnace tests with specimens of floor-beamassembly of different spans and intervals of the beams. The study intends to explore the possibility to widen the application of and to develop theoreticalmethod for the design of traditionalwooden construction. It has resulted in the prediction of the fire safety performance of floor-beamassemblies by thismethod closer to reality than those by the conventional deformation-based assessment.