VIRGILE project: The concept of virtual fire resistance facility for the assessment of construction products performance

Construction industries products have to satisfy fire safety regulation, including technical approvals in fire resistance, by tests in accredited laboratories. Fire resistance tests lay down on a complex protocol, in which full size samples are settled in large furnaces able to reproduce severe time-dependent fire curves. The full-scale mounting and the cost of such tests could be a constraint for their development. In that context, the concept of virtual facility has been developed by Efectis during the VIRGILE project. The use and development of numerical simulation tools are an interesting complement to the fire tests. The developed tool aims to model a fire resistance test including interaction between sample and fire test facility. The virtual facility allows to better analyze and evaluate a large number of technical alternatives in order to find the most efficient technical and economical solutions. Moreover, numerical simulations may improve the testing conditions including thermal stress control and metrology. This paper presents an overview of the main results and applications achieved during the VIRGILE project in ten years.