ABSTRACT
Fire is one of the governing load cases for design of precast tunnel segments in transit tunnels. As the best practice, a design procedure is provided based on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation of a light-rail train fire and importing CFD results into a two-dimensional coupled thermo-mechanical finite element analysis (FEA). Application of this procedure to a 6-m diameter tunnel made of Fiber-reinforced concrete (FRC) segments is presented. While use of standard fire curves simplifies the design, it can result in overestimation of fire load on segments. Results show that once the actual fire curve of a light-rail train from CFD analysis used together with a coupled thermo-mechanical FEA, more realistic fire loads can be obtained, resulting in an optimized design of FRC segments.
