DEVELOPMENT OF AN AUTOMATED PROCEDURE FOR VALIDATION OF METHODS OF CALCULATION OF CHARACTERISTICS OF FIRE PROTECTIVE CAPACITY FOR COATINGS FOR STEEL

Abstract

Given the importance of the reliability of data on the fire-retardant ability of fire-retardant materials in determining the design parameters of fire-retardant objects, research aimed at developing procedures for evaluating methods for determining the properties of fire-retardant systems is relevant. The study aimed to improve the implementation of the existing procedure for validation of methods for calculating the characteristics of the fire-retardant ability of coatings for steel structures, which is based on a computational experiment. To achieve this goal, a block diagram of the algorithm was developed and software was created using the Python 3.7 programming language with integrated JetBrains PyCharm development environment for automated implementation of this validation procedure, which minimizes the number of manual input and data transfer operations between software packages, it is applied. The block diagram consists of three modules. Module № 1 is designed to automate the process of input data input and determine the actual temperature values of experimental samples of steel structures. Module № 2 introduces procedures for determining the thermal conductivity of the fire-retardant coating. Module № 3 is designed to determine the deviation between the calculated and actual values of the required minimum thickness of the fire-retardant coating for different values of the cross-sectional coefficient of the steel structure, the critical temperature of steel and the normalized period of fire resistance. The results of approbation of the created software product testify to its suitability for practical application for validation of methods of calculation of the characteristic of fire-retardant ability of coverings for steel designs given in EN 13381-4: 2013 and EN 13381-8: 2013. The directions of further researches which are focused on revealing of dependences between degree of conformity of results of calculation to actual value of necessary minimum thickness of a fire-retardant covering, thermal properties of a fire-retardant covering and parameters of experimental samples of steel designs are defined.