Behaviour of steel joints under fire loading

This paper presents a state-of-the-art on the behaviour of steel joints under fire loading and some recent developments in this field, currently being carried out by the authors. Firstly, a review of the experimental research work on steel joints is presented, subdivided into isolated member tests, sub-structure tests and tests on complete building structures. Special emphasis is placed on the seventh Cardington test, carried out by the authors within a collaborative research project led by the Czech Technical University in Prague. Secondly, a brief review of various temperature distributions within a joint is presented, followed by a discussion of the behaviour of isolated joints at elevated temperature, focussing on failure modes and analytical procedures for predicting the moment-rotation behaviour of joints at elevated temperature. Finally, a description of the coupled behaviour of joints as part of complete structures is presented, describing previous work and investigations on real fire (including heating and cooling phases) currently being carried out by the authors.