Fire-structural safety is demonstrated when the design value of the resistance of each structural member is greater or equal to the design value of the effects of the actions, meaning the critical temperature of the structure must be greater or equal to the temperature of the steel. The current Brazilian standards NBR 14323:1999 - "Dimensionamento de estruturas de aço de edifícios em situação de incêndio" (Steel structures fire design) and NBR 14432:2000 - "Exigência de resistência ao fogo de elementos construtivos de edificações" (Required Fire Resistance for Buildings) give detailed information for the fire structural safety verification by simplified methods and allow the use of advanced methods but without specifying them. The simplified methods are not economically suitable for external structures. This paper presents a computational tool to determine the steel temperature based on the more advanced procedures prescribed by Eurocodes 1 and 3, regarding the features of the fire compartment such as: height, width, length, windows´ dimensions, design fire load, place and basic sizes of the external structures. Some suggestions for the future revision of NBR 14432 also are included in this work.
Steel; fire; fire engineering; external structures
