Optimized fire design for steel industrial sheds

Abstract This paper showcases some of the main contributions from the research project Switch2Steel, in which a web application is developed for the calculation and optimization of the cost of steel industrial sheds. Unprotected steel structures, compared to other construction materials, possess relatively low fire resistance. To enhance their fire performance, adequate fire protection is required. Simplified fire design, without considering the real influence of the main parameters on the development and propagation of natural fires, often leads to excessive amounts of costly protective material. On the other hand, the use of advanced software tools may be impractical because of iterative time‐consuming computational processes such as structural optimization. Hence, this work presents a simple user‐friendly calculation tool that allows users to define the characteristics of the sheds to be built and based on a set of metrics, weights, and advanced algorithms, to minimize their cost by reducing the consumption of steel and fire protection material. To illustrate the use of the tool, a reference case of a steel industrial shed is selected and the results obtained by the tool are compared with those obtained by FEM tools. The tool gives more optimized results than the use of prescriptive rules, and the results are obtained considerably faster than by advanced expensive computational tools.