While the construction of high-rise buildings has become popular in big cities, an average of over 15,000 structure fires in those buildings are being reported in the United States. Especially because the fire in a building can result in a failure or even the collapse of the structure, assessing its integrity during and after the fire is of importance. Thus, in this paper, a framework with temperature sensors using wireless communication technology has been proposed. Associated hardware and software are carefully chosen and developed to provide an easy and effective solution for measuring fire load on large-scale structures during a fire. With an autonomous measurement system enabled, the key functions of the framework have been validated in a fire testing laboratory, using a real-scale steel column subject to standard fire. Unlike existing solutions of wireless temperature networks, the proposed solution can provide the user definable sampling frequencies based on the surface temperature and the means to assess the load redistribution of the structure due to fire loading in real-time. The results of the study show the great potential of using the developed framework for monitoring fire in a structure, allowing more accurate estimations of fire load in the design criteria, and advancing fire safety engineering.
Keywords: fire safety engineering; performance-based fire protection design; wireless temperature sensor network.