Citation

Yan F, Sun G, Xue S. Fire (Basel) 2022; 5(5): e162.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2022, MDPI: Multidisciplinary Digital Publications Institute)

DOI

10.3390/fire5050162

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Air-supported structures are widely used as public buildings. Air-supported structures are soft and most traditional fire-fighting installations cannot be used in them. Existing design specifications only specify the fire resistance of the materials to be used for air-supported structures and there is no fire resistance design method for air-supported structures. The destruction process of air-supported structures can be divided into three stages: pre-fracture, leakage, and collapse. Theorical and numerical models were used to research the time span of all those stages. A framework to estimate the collapse and evacuation time was proposed in this paper. Air-supported structures with different spans were researched in this paper, and we found that the height of a structure has a significant influence on its fire resistance. The evacuation time increased by more than 52 times when the structure's span increased from 20 m to 80 m. The pre-fracture stage contributed to more than 90% of the evacuation time when the span of structure was larger than 80 m.

Language: en

Keywords

air-supported structures; collapse; fire condition; weld joint