Large Scale Test on a Steel Column Exposed to Localized Fire

A localized fire is a fire which in a compartment is unlikely to reach flash-over and uniform temperature distribution. Designing for localized fires is generally more difficult than for flash-over compartment fires because of the complexity of the problem. There is also a lack of experimental data. We report here on a full scale test series on a steel column exposed to localized fires. The setup is a 6 meters tall hollow circular column, ϕ = 200 mm with a steel thickness of 10 mm. The unloaded column was hanging centrally above different pool fires. Temperatures of gas and steel were measured by thermocouples, and adiabatic surface temperatures at the steel surface were measured by plate thermometers of various designs. The results are compared with estimates based on Eurocode 1991-1-2 which in all cases studied overestimate the thermal impact for this setup. The input from plate thermometers was used to compute the steel temperatures using finite element methods. Excellent agreement was found if the radiation exchange within the column due to asymmetry of the exposure was taken into account.