Use of LS-DYNA for Structural Fire Engineering

Structural response in fire is complex and can only be properly investigated using finite element analysis considering non-linear geometry and material properties. Full scale fire testing to investigate the real response of structural forms to severe fires represents significant risks to researchers and is also expensive and difficult to undertake effectively. Therefore, computational tools are necessary for the safe design of structures under fire conditions. The majority of the computational tools currently used for structural fire analyses use static solvers. Explicit dynamic solvers such as in LS-DYNA are rarely used even though they are capable of dealing with highly non-linear problems.