Thermo-mechanical Analysis of Fire Doors Subjected to a Fire Endurance Test

Abstract

Fires doors are subjected to standard fire tests as a means of evaluating fire resistance. In this study, the thermal and mechanical response of steel double fire doors exposed to high temperatures was modeled using finite element software. The model included the necessary complexity of the product and test setup along with the temperature dependency of the constituent materials. For the thermal solution, a transient analysis was carried out while for the mechanical solution, it was found that a nonlinear steady state analysis was sufficient to capture the qualitative behavior of the fire doors seen during the test. The challenges of validating a numerical model with the limited data available from the standard fire test are described.