ABSTRACT
The current state-of-the-art in performance based structural fire engineering, from a practical and regulatory perspective, is best represented by the Structural Eurocodes for fire design of concrete (CEN 2004) and steel (CEN 2005) structures. These codes provide simplified means by which engineers can approximate natural or ‘parametric’ design fires. Parametric fires include a cooling phase; this is far more realistic than the perpetual heating of a standard fire. The Eurocodes also allow designers to take various approaches, of increasing complexity, to assess a structure’s performance during exposure to a parametric fire.
