ABSTRACT
Recent years have seen intensive activities and major advances in the field
of steel structures in fire, including research activities to gain a thorough
understanding of this subject and accelerating engineering applications of the
research results. In this book, the term "steel structure" is used to refer to both
steel and composite steel-concrete structures. Not so long ago, one would auto-
matically accept that steelwork would need fire protection and use the fire
protection thickness based on the standard fire resistance tests. This is following
the prescriptive approach. The validity of this prescriptive approach is now
being questioned and the availability of new understanding and knowledge is
enabling safer and more economical design and construction of steel structures
for fire safety within the framework of the "fire engineering" or "performance-
based" approach. Of course, the concept of the "fire engineering" approach is
not new, some 30 years ago, Pettersson etal. presented the first comprehensive
treatment of fire engineering of steel structures (Pettersson etal. 1976).
