Fire Performance of Self-Tapping Screws in Tall Mass-Timber Buildings

Building elements are required to provide sufficient fire resistance based on requirements set forth in the National Building Code of Canada (NBCC). Annex B of the Canadian standard for wood engineering design (CSA O86-19) provides a design methodology to calculate the structural fire-resistance of large cross-section timber elements. However, it lacks at providing design provisions for connections. The objectives of this study are to understand the fire performance of modern mass timber fasteners such as self-tapping screws, namely to evaluate their thermo-mechanical behavior and to predict their structural fire-resistance for standard fire exposure up to two hours, as would be required for tall buildings in Canada. The results present the great fire performance of using self-tapping screws under a long time exposure on connections in mass timber construction. The smaller heated area of the exposed surface has limited thermal conduction along the fastener’s shanks and maintained their temperature profiles relatively low for two hours of exposure. Based on the heat-affected area, the study presents new design principles to determine the residual length of penetration that would provide adequate load-capacity of the fastener under fire conditions. It also allows determining safe fire-resistance values for unprotected fasteners in mass timber construction exposed up to two hours of standard fire exposure.

Comparison of Simplified and Advanced Design of Steel Structures in Fire

This paper presents the possible deviations between “realistic” (performance-based) calculations of fire resistance of steel structures and corresponding calculations made by one of the often used simplified (prescriptive) procedures of EN 1993-1-2 i.e. the method of critical temperature (MCT). The comparison is done for a case of an assembly consisting of a steel beam and a steel girder connected to each other by a bolted fin-plate connection. For such structure the MCT method suggests that the structural fire resistance is 50 minutes. However, the realistic fire resistance calculated by an advanced performance-based procedure is evaluated to 44 minutes. Although the discrepancy between the results of both methods is not significant in the presented case, this finding implies that MCT can be on the unsafe side for some cases. More future debates and clarifications are therefore encouraged regarding the actual limits of the applicability of the simplified procedures.