Inelastic Strength for Fire Resistance of Composite I-Beam Covered by Insulation Material Subjected to Basic Loading Condition

This paper presents a nonlinear numerical study on the moment resistance of composite steel-concrete beam using fire insulation subjected to various fire scenarios and basic loading conditions. The temperature-dependent material properties of fire insulation, concrete and steel were taken into consideration. The nonlinear finite element analysis was done by utilizing a commercial finite element program, ABAQUS. The obtained moment capacity of the composite I-beam from the current fire code was also performed and compared. The results showed that the fire scenarios and the fire insulation thickness have a great influence on the temperature distribution and strength degradation of the composite beam. The capacity of the beam in hydrocarbon fires, which is the most severe scenario, decreases faster than that in ISO834 standard fire and external fire. The fire resistance of the beam increases as the fire insulation thickness increases due to the temperature degradation in the steel beam. The calculated results from the current fire codes give conservative value at normal temperature and low temperature. The current fire codes can give unconservative values at high temperature when there is a great temperature discrepancy between parts of the beam. A new factor was proposed to determine the fire moment resistance of the composite beam with non-uniform temperature.

Florida Agritourism Building and Fire Codes

Agritourism marries Florida’s two largest industries, tourism and agriculture, to provide an on-farm recreational experience for consumers. Although Florida trails many other states in the number of agritourism operations, the number of Florida farms offering recreational experiences more than doubled from 2007 to 2012. This new 4-page document describes building codes relevant to Florida agritourism operations. Written by Mary Beth Henry and Kathryn A. Stofer, and published by the UF/IFAS Department of Agricultural Education and Communication.https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/wc349 A companion document, Florida’s Agritourism Laws, EDIS publication AEC623, Florida’s Agritourism Laws, http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/wc285, discusses Florida Statutes related to definitions, liability protections, and limits to regulatory authority of local governments over bona fide agricultural operations engaged in agritourism.

An Efficient LUT based Approach towards Channel Coding in GSM and its Implementation

Background & Objective: The channel coding improves the performance of the mobile network link by adding redundant bits in the message in order to detect and correct the errors occurred during transmission of the data. The traditional method involved in channel coding for GSM has more number of operations, its computation time and complexity was very high which increases the latency in communication. To reduce the latency, we propose a novel and efficient Look Up Table (LUT) based implementation using Fire codes for Control Channel Coding in GSM. Method: In this research paper, a new and competent LUT based implementation towards channel coding in GSM is projected. This proposed technique will significantly decrease the computation time and number of cycles with less complexity. The suggested method improvises the coding scheme of FIRE codes adopted in GSM communication system by reducing the number of shift operations to zero. Results: The proposed LUT based method outperforms the conventional method by reducing the number of cycles, XOR operations, shift operations, execution time and memory consumption. Our algorithm achieved around 89% improvement in Fire code implementation compared to Shift and XOR method, which is, consider as significant growth for GSM communication system. Conclusion: The proposed technique demonstrated the significant improvement in reducing the latency and memory usage in comparison to the conventional method.

Taking Advantage of Collective Intelligence and BIM-Based Virtual Reality in Fire Safety Inspection for Commercial and Public Buildings

Commercial and public buildings are more vulnerable to fires because of their complex use functions, large number of centralized occupants, and the dynamic nature of the use of space. Due to the large number of these types of buildings and the limited availability of manpower, annual fire inspections cannot ensure the continuous compliance of fire codes. A crowdsourcing application, iInspect, is proposed in this paper to harvest collective intelligence in order to conduct mass inspection tasks. This approach is supported by building information modeling (BIM) based virtual reality (VR) and an indoor real-time localization system. Based on the International Fire Code and 27 fire inspection checklists compiled by various local authorities, a generic list of inspection items suitable for iInspect is proposed, along with a reputation-based monetary incentive model. A prototype of iInspect was created for Android mobile phones, and a case study was performed in an office building in Tianjin, China, for verification of this crowdsourcing inspection approach.

Florida’s Agritourism Laws

Agritourism marries Florida’s two largest industries, tourism and agriculture, to provide an on-farm recreational experience for consumers. Florida has experienced record tourism in recent years, with 105 million visitors spending more than $85 billion in 2015, according to VISIT Florida1. Although Florida trails many other states in the number of agritourism operations2, the number of Florida farms offering recreational experiences more than doubled from 281 in 2007 to 724 in 2012, according to USDA Census of Agriculture data3. This document describes the laws governing Florida agritourism operations, including the original 2013 definition (F.S. 570.96) and clarifications passed in 2016 (F.S. 570.85-89). A companion document, Agritourism Building Code Rule Development4, discusses statutes affecting building and fire codes for agritourism operations.

Modelling the Response of Simply-Supported Two-Way Reinforced Concrete Slabs Exposed to Fire

The historically good performance of concrete structures in real fires, and the lack of urgent drivers for the concrete industry to support research on the fire performance of concrete structures, means that research on the full frame response of concrete buildings to fires has received much less attention than for steel-framed structures. However, a credible understanding of, and ability to model, the response of concrete structures under fire exposure is crucial to make further progress in the field of structural fire engineering, and to make best use of the flexibility enabled by performance-based fire codes. This paper presents a computational study on the structural behaviour of reinforced concrete slabs during fire tests undertaken by Zhang et al.[16]. The distribution of stresses in the slabs is discussed, as is the need for further research to better understand structural response during fire. Amongst other factors, the assumed tensile strength of the concrete is crucial to accurately predict response. The results corroborate the existing consensus that concrete slabs in real buildings can, in some cases, withstand fires for longer than expected; this is due to mobilisation of membrane actions, amongst other factors.

Firefighting Capacity Assessment in Armed Forces Hospitals

As the general public begin to attach greater importance to the firefighting capacities of large public infrastructures, it is high time for an overhaul of the medical, leisure and teaching infrastructures and so on concerning their firefighting capacities. In response to the especially drastic increase in the demands for medical resources, armed forces hospitals are being opened to the public for medical and teaching purposes. In order to meet the daily needs and maintain their operations in a sustainable manner, these hospitals have gone through many spatial and furnishing alterations, hence the changes in their original constructional and fire protection design. These changes, however, might lead to an increase in the risk factors. With Taoyuan Armed Forced General Hospital, which is fairly large in size, as the fireground for the simulation, and the previous cases of fire in the hospital as the basis for the numerical simulation analysis, this study is set out mainly to investigate and validate the impacts of the firefighting facilities (which are consistent with the fire codes and regulations) on the efforts of the people inside the hospital to escape from a fire under such a variety of circumstances as when the space is closed, open, or as the fire sources change in nature and position. Compartmentalization and precautions are used in the process to minimize fire losses. The main objective of this study is to develop some fire safety education materials for such public places as government organizations and schools.