Beafire – simulating fire resistance of reinforced concrete beams

Beafire is an engineering tool for simulation of fire resistance of reinforced beams. Besides calculating the time to collapse due to fire, it allows to monitor temperature distribution in arbitrary cross-section and the redistribution of bending moments due to the changes of beam stiffness caused by high temperature. The application incorporates design code assumptions as specified by EN-1992-1 and EN-1992-1-2

Package architecture:

The Beafire package consists of three related but in fact independent programs (executables):

* Beafire GUI – graphical user interface enabling definition of a problem and visualisation of results. The whole problem definition can be exported to a file and send for further analysis by Beafire calculation engine (or other software)

* BeafireKernel – simulation engine. Based on a problem definition read from a data file it performs the whole simulation of a beam on the basis of developed algorithm. The temperature distribution in beam cross-section is delegated to an external FEM engine.

* FEM Engine – adapted OpenSource FEM solver for solving non-linear transient heat flow problem in beam cross-section

Package details:

• Beafire is implemented in C++. Graphical user interface is build on top of Qt library (version > 5). For easier construction of user interface custom widgets are implemented as plugins for QtDesigner.
• Problem description is saved in XML format. Import and export of problem description is done with QxmlStreamReader and QxmlStreamWriter from Qt library.
• The drawings generated dynamically from input data are saved in SVG format and rendred by Qt library.
• Data transfer between GUI and Engine modules is done by serialization mechanism based on Cereal library.
• Visualization of temperature distribution in beam cross-section is done with VTK library.
• The simulation engine is in current version implemented in Matlab.
• Communication between C++ modules and Matlab one is done via data files in HDF5 format.
• Beafire can generate reports from simulation from predefined templates and save them in LaTeX format. They can be further rendered to PDF documents.