Fire modelling and structural assessment of automated clad‐rack warehouses

Automated Rack Supported Warehouses (ARSW) are self‐bearing rack structures designed to support, besides self‐weight and weight of products, environmental loads (i.e., wind, snow and seismic action) and all the other non‐structural elements. These structures are unique in the design; indeed, they represent a topic of great interest for both the scientific community and for the manufacturers of industrial racks. However, the behavior in case of fire of these structures is still poorly known. In order to study the fire resistance of these structures to consider a natural fire curve is necessary. In particular, a vertically traveling fire model in the upright frames, starting from a localized fire has to be modelled.

This paper proposes a fire model that considered both the vertical and horizontal fire propagation, evaluated and validated against experimental test results. In addition, advanced thermo‐mechanical analyses using both natural and nominal fire curves, were performed with a finite element software (SAFIR), which allows modeling Class 4 steel elements considering the local instabilities that can occur in these slender sections. A comparison between the capacity models that the regulations propose for these structural elements, was also conducted.