Post-earthquake Fire Analysis in Urban Structures: Risk Management Strategies

Post-earthquake fire is one of the most complicated problems resulting from earthquakes and presents a serious risk to urban structures. Most standards and codes ignore the possibility of post-earthquake fire; thus it is not factored in when determining the ability of buildings to withstand load.

This book describes the effects of post-earthquake fire on partially damaged buildings located in seismic urban regions. The book quantifies the level of associated post-earthquake fire effects, and discusses methods for mitigating the risk at both the macro scale and micro scale. The macro scale strategies address urban regions while the micro scale strategies address building structures, covering both existing buildings and those that are yet to be designed.

Behrouz Behnan completed his BSc in Civil Engineering in 1995 from Amirkabir University of Technology in Iran. He has been researching in the field of structural engineering since he started his MSc in 2004. In his MSc, he proposed a methodology in order to assess the damaged state of seismic regions urbanised by both old and new buildings when exposed to earthquake loads. He then wrote a number of journal and conference papers to introduce the methodology. During his PhD and afterward, Dr Behnam has been focused on the effect of post-earthquake fire (PEF) loads on urban structures. In order to simulate the PEF, he proposed a methodology named sequential analysis and has widely investigated the behavior of various structures under PEF. He has also proposed a few methods in order to mitigate the effects of PEF on conventional structures. From 2012 to 2014, Dr Behnam has published more than 28 journal and conference papers about PEF. He is now an assistant professor at Amirkabir University of Technology and associate researcher in Structural Retrofit Research Group at the University of Queensland. He is also director and editorial board member of the Journal of Iranian Society of Civil Engineers.