Description
The fire behavior of the automated rack-supported warehouse (ARSW) is a topic of great interest both for the scientific community and for the manufacturers of industrial racks, however, their behavior in case of fire of is still poorly known. ARSWs are a particular type of steel racks that combine the structural efficiency of steel construction with automated machines for handling stored products. The paper focuses on investigating the fire scenario and the collapse mechanism of a typical ARSW by considering a fire model that allows vertical and horizontal propagation, starting from a localized fire, evaluated, and validated against experimental results. The study is composed of two fundamental phases: fire simulation by using both the Computational Fluid Dynamics model and zone model and investigation of the structural elements collapse through finite element structural analysis. These analyses were performed with two different software SAFIR and ABAQUS, to compare their capability to obtain the collapse mechanism of these structures.
