Fire Engineering of Buildings-Some Aspects on the Situation in Switzerland and EuropeRecent Research at ETH Zurich

Abstract

It’s a great pleasure to be here today and a great honor to present a little about what is going on in fire research in Europe. I’d like to speak first about fire regulations because this is most important if you want to use fire safety engineering. One important aspect is natural fires, since they differ from standard fires, and then I will speak about structural fire design especially with regards to the robustness of safety measures. I will then present some research topics as Dr Osaki asked, and I’ll talk a little about Eurocodes. Now, in terms of fire regulations, there are different concepts; performance-based concepts and prescriptive concepts. With prescriptive concepts, still mostly used in Europe, design is easy. You just open the book and do what it says. However, it offers little flexibility and it may be quite expensive for steel structures. With performance-based design, you only get objective based regulation and then you make the design. The problem is that you have to go to the authorities and discuss it and get it accepted. So may be you do a design and after 6 months you find out they don’ t want to accept it. So although you have a lot of flexibility, you also have the risk that acceptance will take a long time. Therefore, in Swiss regulation, we have introduced something in between. We give free choice between different concepts. Either you go with the traditional structural concept with structural fire resistance or you add a Figure 2.2.1