The Fire Testing Centre, a laboratory approved for fire resistance by the French Ministry of the Interior, carries out your fire safety engineering studies under conventional fires and real fire scenarios, , for all construction methods (reinforced and prestressed concrete structures, steel and composite steel and concrete structures, wood structures).
Our services.
• Fire safety engineering studies
• Fire stability studies of structures under standard temperature-time curves and real fires
• Structural failure/collapse mode studies
• Study of the fire behaviour of structures and proposals for suitable protection solutions when necessary
• Analytical studies of human evacuation
• “Avis de chantier” (French regulatory document)
• “Avis sur étude” (French regulatory document for third part expertise of structural fire behaviour engineering studies)
• Expertise on structures after fire
• Diagnosis of the fire resistance of structures
The approach of a fire safety engineering study.
Fire safety engineering consists of assessing the behaviour of a structure or a building under fire, considering all its specificities (its function – storage, residential, etc., and its types of structure – concrete, steel, wood, etc.).
The first step is to define the safety objectives and associated performance criteria. These may be:
• Fire resistance time of the structures
• Fire stability of the structures compatible with the evacuation of people and the intervention of emergency services
• Non-collapse in chain of structures
• Non-collapse towards the outside.
The fire safety engineering study then proceeds in several steps:
• Step 1: Preliminary risk analysis
• Step 2: Design fire scenario studies
• Step 3: Fire development simulation, thermal action assessment
• Step 4: Assessment of the thermomechanical behaviour of structures
Our skills
and our tools.
and our tools.
Fire safety engineering mobilises many skills covered by our teams of expert engineers:
• Combustion, fluid mechanics, thermics..: fire development, and smoke movement.
• Structural mechanics: thermo-mechanical response of concrete, reinforced concrete, pre-stressed concrete, steel, composite and wood structures and of compartmentalisation elements.
Different means can be used in a fire safety engineering study:
• Calculation methods
– Simplified methods (analytical, defined in Eurocodes and rules of the art)
– Advanced methods (numerical simulations using FDS for fire development and SAFIR for structural behaviour calculation)
• Experimentation
– Input data for calculation methods to extrapolate results from small-scale tests
– Conducting full-scale tests if calculation methods do not exist
• Statistical data
– Input data for calculation methods
– For probabilistic analyses and expert judgements
Sectors of activity.
The studies carried out by our teams of expert engineers cover the following sectors of activity:
• Buildings (residential, offices, ERP – building open to public)
• High-rise buildings (IGH in French)
• Classified installations (ICPE in French)
• Engineering structures (bridges, footbridges)
• Underground works (tunnels, cut and cover tunnels)
• Nuclear facilities (INB in French)
Our other activities.