VALIDATION OF METHODS OF CALCULATION OF MINIMUM THICKNESS OF FIRE-PROTECTIVE MATERIALS FOR STEEL STRUCTURES

Abstract

Given the importance of the reliability of data on fire-retardant ability of fire-protective materials in determining the design parameters of fire-retardant objects, research is relevant to further improve and develop methods for assessing the quality of these materials, including the accuracy of the results. The article presents the results of the study of the convergence of accuracy of European and national methods for calculating the minimum thickness of fire-protective materials designed to protect steel structures based on solving the equation of thermal conductivity (with variable and constant thermal conductivity of fire-protective material). During this study, a validation procedure based on the application of the computational experiment method was used to determine the accuracy of European calculation methods. This procedure determines the accuracy of European calculation methods, which are based on the solution of the thermal equation and is given in EN 13381-4:2013 and EN 13381-8:2013. Block diagrams and software using the Python 3.7 programming language with the JetBrains PyCharm integrated development environment were developed for the software implementation of the validation procedure. According to the results of the validation it is established that the deviation ranges between the calculated and actual values of the minimum thickness of the fire-protective material for European methods with variable and constant thermal conductivity are from –2.6 % to 2.4 % and from –0.3 % to 3.5 %, which is acceptable for the practical application of these methods. It is established that there is a significant difference between the values of the accuracy of European and national calculation methods, which are given in DSTU B V.1.1-17:2007. The range of deviation between the calculated and actual values of the minimum thickness of the fire-protective material for European calculation methods is significantly (22.8 times) smaller than for national methods.