| Location | The Conference Center at One North Wacker, 1 N. Upper Wacker Drive, 2nd Floor |
The emerging proliferation of structural fire engineering in the U.S. will disrupt long-standing norms in structural fire protection. For the past century, project stakeholders have tolerated a strikingly inefficient and amorphous system for protecting structures from uncontrolled fire, often leaving structural engineers absent from the structural fire protection design process. Traditionally, designers consider fire protection measures only after they had optimized structures for ambient design loads – gravity, wind, seismic, and others – with no explicit consideration of structural fire performance. However, this area represents one of the most promising opportunities for designers to provide value-added services moving forward. In this presentation, we will introduce structural fire engineering in this respect, and similarly seek to empower building officials to question and challenge structural fire protection variances that are not conducted in accordance with new industry standards.
After attending this presentation, participants will be able to:
- Differentiate between standard fire resistance design and structural fire engineering design.
- Learn about the treatment of fire effects as a structural load.
- Understand how new industry standardization applies to structural fire protection variances.
- Identify potential benefits of adopting structural fire engineering design for building projects.
