A preliminary investigation on the failure of prestressed members under natural fires

The present work is aimed at investigating the behaviour of prestressed concrete members under the effects of natural fires, that are characterized by the presence of a cooling phase. To this aim, several numerical analyses were carried out on a typical P/C section in order to highlight the most significant parameters. The results show that the high insulating power of concrete, together with the rate of cooling, play a decisive role for the failure probability of P/C members in the cooling phase.