A method for hybrid fire testing: Development, implementation and numerical application

Hybrid Fire Testing (HFT) is a technique that allows assessing experimentally the fire performance of a structural element under real boundary conditions that capture the effect of the surrounding structure. To enable HFT, there is a need for a method that is unconditionally stable, ensures equilibrium and compatibility at the interface and captures the global behaviour of the analysed structure. A few attempts at conducting HFT have been described in the literature, but it can be shown, based on the analytical study of a simple one degree-of-freedom elastic system, that the considered method was fundamentally unstable in certain configurations which depend on the relative stiffness between the two substructures, but which cannot be easily predicted in advance. In this paper, a new method is introduced to overcome the stability problem and it is shown through analytical developments and applicative examples that the stability of the new method does not depend on the stiffness ratio between the two substructures. The new method is applied in a virtual hybrid test on a 2D reinforced concrete beam part of a moment resisting frame, showing that stability, equilibrium and compatibility are ensured on the considered multiple degree-of-freedom system. Besides, the virtual HFT succeeds in reproducing the global behaviour of the analysed structure. The method development and implementation in a virtual (numerical) setting is described, the next step being its implementation in a real (laboratory) hybrid test.