FIRESTEEL: A COMPUTATIONAL TOOL FOR THE STUDY OF STEEL ELEMENTS IN FIRE SITUATION

Resumo

Fire is the occurrence of uncontrolled fire, an extremely dangerous phenomenon that can affect the
safety of buildings, sheltered heritage and living beings. By causing the temperature increase, the action of fire
triggers physicochemical transformations that degrade the properties of materials and interfere with the integrity
and behavior of structural elements, which can compromise the resistance capacity of the structure as a whole.
This phenomenon is particularly important in the case of steel structures, as the elements usually used are generally
light, slender and with an open cross-section, characteristics that tend to favor the quick heating of the parts. In
this context, it is essential to study the evolution of the temperature in steel as a function of the temperature
variation of the gases, as well as the consequent degradation of the resistance capacity of the structural elements.
Once the problem is established, this work presents the FireSteel application, a computational tool developed in
Python language that allows the evaluation of the thermal evolution, the verification of the resistant force and the
determination of the critical temperature in structural steel elements in fire situation. For this, FireSteel has a
customizable data entry that gives the user the freedom to select the data they want to obtain. The calculations
were made in accordance with the Brazilian technical standards currently in force and the results were validated
based on information available in the technical literature.