- Author
- Robinson, J.
- Title
- Background to the Cardington Fire Test Programme.
- Coporate
- British Steel, UK
- Report
- Cardtn94, 1994, 35 p.
- Keywords
- fire tests | building construction | building fires | high rise buildings | steel structures | case histories | test facilities
- Abstract
- In 1990 an event occurred which I think will prove to be instrumental in changing the way we think about design of building structures. The event was a major fire in a 14-storey building under construction in Broadgate in London. The steel frame although not fully fire protected at the time of the fire, survived without collapse. This illustrated in a very dramatic way something that we have all known intuitively for many years. That whole structures can behave very differently from the way we might predict from relatively small scale laboratory tests. Whenever we test isolated elements, the vibration behaviour of a single floor, the deformation behaviour of a single connection, the fire behaviour of a single column, we have to make assumptions to translate that small scale test result into large scale structure behaviour, and assumptions are breeding grounds for errors. This large scale facility opens the opportunity to reduce these assumptions and thus minimise the errors. This will apply to all of the test programmes but since my expertise is in fire I will confine my short presentation to the potential impact of the fire programme.