Keywords: fire design, effective temperatures, non-linear analysis, reinforced concrete in fire.

In case of fire the protection of human life and the prevention of irreparable damage have become a mandatory requirement and an important research topic. In strategic structures such as hospitals, civil defence and military buildings, it is important to limit deformations in order to guarantee the building serviceability also in the case of fire.

The aim of the work, described in this paper, is to estimate the deformations of some structural elements (beams and columns) subjected to fire and to extend the results to more complex structures. By means of the SAFIR code a nonlinear structural analysis has been performed for simple reinforced concrete elements subject to standard fire conditions. Hence, 'effective temperatures' have been determined imposing the equality of deformations obtained by linear calculation and the ones obtained by SAFIR. Deflections and elongations obtained by 'effective temperatures' approach have been compared to the ones obtained by the nonlinear SAFIR analysis. The results show an acceptable error percentage taking into account the coarse approximations involved in the procedure.

The 'effective temperatures' method allows early assessment of the serviceability limit state of complex structures partially subjected to fire.

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