Mikko Salminen
About
Mikko Salminen, Structural Fire Engineering Lead for Europe at Jensen Hughes, has Ph.D. in Structural Fire Engineering. He has over 15 years of experience in performance-based structural fire safety analysis of timber, steel and concrete structures to achieve optimal, fire-safe structural solutions ranging from detail analysis to evaluation of entire structural systems.
Structural Fire Engineering of Timber Structures in Natural Fires
The fire resistance of timber and CLT structures has historically been assessed using testing or calculation methodologies based on principles such as charring rate and effective reduced cross-sections. These methods typically only consider the heating phase of a standard fire. Recent experimental studies have shown that such calculation methodologies may be oversimplifying the assessments, resulting in potentially unsafe structures particularly during the cooling phase of a fire.
Structural fire engineering, including advanced finite element methods and numerical simulations, offers significant benefits for technical assessments of timber structures and can complement resource-intensive and expensive full-scale tests.
This presentation explores the structural fire engineering of different timber elements in natural fires. The numerical results for timber columns and CLT-slabs are validated against the results of experimental fire tests.