Non-standard Large-Scale Fire Tests of Structures: A Mini Review

Testing of large-scale structural fire has seen a resurgence in recent years, after nearly a century of using the test of standard fire resistance to understand how structural members respond to fires. The regulatory and scientific communities are grappling with a host of issues related to demonstrating adequate structural performance utilizing unrealistic temperature–time curves that are applied on isolated structural members. As a result, non-standard fire testing that is done on a large scale with real fire rather than conventional fires is gaining popularity. Several non-standard, custom-made testing facilities have recently been developed or are almost finished. Over the last three decades, non-standard fire testing has revealed substantial faults in our knowledge of real-world building performance in the face of real-world fire; in most cases, these problems would not have been discovered in tests of conventional furnaces. This study provides a brief overview of necessary non-standard structural fire engineering research conducted on a wide scale in recent decades. It highlights gaps and study requirements based on past research findings and the writers’ evaluation of the information. There is also a summary of comparative research needs evaluations that have been conducted or presented in the last ten years. The overall goal is to identify knowledge gaps and guide future studies in structural fire engineering, especially large-scale experimental studies focusing on reinforced concrete structures.