Effect of creep on behaviour of steel structural assemblies in fires

There are presently two general ways of accounting for hazardous metal creep in structural fire analyses: either we incorporate creep strains implicitly in hardening model ('implicit-creep' plasticity) or we account for creep explicitly ('explicit-creep' plasticity). The first approach is simpler and usually used for fast engineering applications, e.g., following proposals of EN 1993-1-2. Prioritizing this approach without consideration of its limitations, however, may lead to significant error. So far the possible levels of such error have been demonstrated by few researchers for individual structural elements (i.e., beams and columns). This paper, however, presents analyses also for selected beam-girder assemblies. Special numerical models are developed correspondingly and they are validated and verified. Their important novelty is that they do not only account for creep in individual members but also for creep in between-member connections. The paper finally shows that outside the declared applicability limits of the implicit-creep plasticity models, the failure times predicted by the applied alternative explicit-creep models can be as much as 40% shorter. Within the limits, however, the discrepancies might be negligible for majority of cases with the exception of about 20% discrepancies found in one analysed example.