Post-Earthquake Fire Tests - Part 2: Failure Modes

During seismic motions, the steel connections are parts of structure that may have permanent damage, changing their strength and stiffness. For this reason, during a post seismic fire, they will work in a different manner, having a different fire resistance. With the help of tests, we want to find the effect of the seismic damage on the fire behavior of the structure. Fire and post-earthquake fire tests were done, together with room temperature tests, for comparison and scale. The main goal was to find the effect of the deterioration due to cyclic action, on the fire behavior of specimens. During earthquake, steel connections may develop a deterioration of strength and stiffness that will lead to a different behavior under fire. In this paper, parallels between different tests are presented. The conclusions are in terms of maximum reached forces and modes of failure in the case of prior deteriorated or new connections subjected to fire.