Fire Endurance of Lightweight Wood Trusses in Building Construction - Essay Example

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The paper 'Fire Endurance of Lightweight Wood Trusses in Building Construction' presents firefighters who lost their lives due to structural fires when structures they were trying to put out the fire collapsed. Wood is the most widespread building material employed in the entire USA…

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Fire Endurance of Lightweight Wood Trusses in Building Construction

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Subject: Military
Type: Essay
Level: Masters
Pages: 1 (250 words)
Downloads: 2
Author: jadenicolas

Extract of sample "Fire Endurance of Lightweight Wood Trusses in Building Construction"

Just like every structural element, these trusses are debatably vulnerable to failure when expose to fire or extremely high temperatures. Wooden houses or ceilings are famous for the quick-fire spread and early disastrous failure in as small as 4 minutes of fire involvement (Malanga, 1995, p44). Unguarded lightweight wooden or even steel binds will stop working after 5 to 10 minutes of contact to fire or extremely high. Binds can fail from contact to heat alone exclusive of any flames. For wood trusses, 100°F (53.8°C) is the decisive temperature (Malanga, 1995, p46).

Metal gusset plates in wooden binds, unless corner-nailed, can distort and fail extremely fast when exposed to high temperature. Even though, both wooden and steel trusses might be confined with fire-retardant treatments to develop their fire opposition, a majority of them lack this essential matter and; hence put the lives of people at risk.

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