Glosey

The aim of this research proposal is to assess the current practices in structural fire safety applied to high-rise buildings in Turkey using fire engineering principles and to establish a framework for decision making when assessing the vulnerability and resilience of these structures. The findings of this research will be a step towards a performance-based fire code in Turkey. In this context, the overall fire risk and the egress time in high-rise buildings will be estimated. Further, the damage of non-structural elements related to fire safety in high-rise buildings will be investigated after an earthquake. Currently, all structures in Turkey are designed according to Turkey’s Regulation on Fire Protection, which uses only a prescriptive approach. Using fire engineering methods, the aim is to minimize both cost and human causalities. Fire engineering has been a fast-evolving research field, which is a combination of fire science and structural engineering. There is only limited research on the structural fire safety in Turkey. The suppression of fire and the evacuation of people from high-rise buildings during fire are complex issues to resolve. With over 1300 high-rise residential building construction in Istanbul, this research field becomes worthwhile to investigate. Because Istanbul and its neighboring region is in 1. and 2. seismic activity zone, it is important to consider a fire incident following an earthquake. The originality of this project is to combine earthquake structural analysis, fire and smoke growth analysis and egress in order to establish a fully integrated fire engineering methodology to minimize the risk of high-rise buildings. The research will also involve earthquake and fire tests to validate the numerical methods. In the first stage, several buildings will be selected as a case study and egress simulations will be conducted. Next, a dynamic analysis will be conducted to calculate the earthquake response of fire safety related nonstructural elements such as fire and elevator doors. Damage and fire safety of the non-structural elements will be estimated by pushover tests followed by fire tests. In the final stage, these damages as well fire related heat and smoke distribution will be incorporated into the egress model and the effect of fire on the egress time will be estimated. The scientific output of the project is the dissemination of the results through the technical committees of which Assistant Professor Serdar Selamet is an active member. These committees are SEI/ASCE Fire Protection Committee in the U.S. and TK3 Fire Committee in Turkey. The experimental findings will also be published in SCI-indexed journals and presented at international conferences. The economic impact of this project is to enable a fast and reliable egress from high-rise residential buildings in case of fire followed by an earthquake and therefore to increase the building resilience and reduce the casualties in case of such disaster. The project duration is expected to be three years.