Green's Function Approach for Heat Conduction: Application to Steel Members Protected by Intumescent Paint

Abstract

Green's function approach provides a new possibility of analytical procedure for heat transfer analysis of structures in fire. In many cases, it has been applied successfully to predict the temperature field. Heat transfer analysis of structure members protected by intumescent paint is complicated by active expansion of the base coat at elevated temperature. Because of this complex thermal behavior of intumescence, as well as commercial concern about the release of information, very little research has been reported in the literature. In this article, a Green's function method based on a one-dimensional reduced heat transfer model is presented. The highly nonlinear thermal conductivity of the intumescent paint is simplified to be temperature-independent to yield analytically tractable solutions of heat equations. The proposed approach is verified against the experimental investigation as well as finite-element analysis.

The authors would like to thank Dr. Claudio Pagella and the company IRIS Vernici for providing the experimental results on tests of intumescent paint.