Numerical modelling of thin-walled stainless steel structural elements in case of fire

peer reviewedIn this paper, numerical tests made in stainless steel thin-walled elements, using the program SAFIR, will be presented. In order to make these simulations, two main changes in SAFIR were made: i) the program was changed in order to deal with the stainless steel 2D material properties to be used with shell elements and ii) the possibility of the program to take into account residual stresses in shell elements was introduced. The stainless steel stress-strain relationship at high temperatures, was based on the one presented in part 1.2 of Eurocode 3 [1], which has no initial linear branch as the case of carbon steel. The hardening rule to be used on the shell element formulation could not be exactly established without an approximation of the Eurocode 3 constitutive law [1]. Due to the fact that the SAFIR procedure to take into account the residual stresses consists in transforming them first into residual strains and adding them after to the other initial strains [2], it was necessary to implement a procedure that took in consideration the nonlinearity of the material stress-strain relationship. The paper shows the influence of the residual stresses on the ultimate load bearing resistance of thin-walled stainless steel structural elements in case of fire