Elizabethtown College Engineering Professor’s Paper Published in Fire Safety Journal

Elizabethtown College Assistant Professor of Engineering and Physics Jean Batista Abreu recently had his paper published in the Fire Safety Journal, the leading publication dealing with all aspects of fire safety engineering.

The paper, “Cold-formed steel sheathing connections at elevated temperature,” provides experimental results related to the elevated temperature performance of connections between cold-formed steel members and sheathing. Cold-formed steel building structures rely on sheathing for their mechanical benefits including bracing against member twist, global flexural and flexural-torsional buckling, and cross-section distortional buckling, as well as to supply lateral strength and energy dissipation in shear walls and diaphragms. Sheathing is also relied upon for non-structural benefits, including: fire, acoustic, and thermal performance.

“Connections between cold-formed steel members and sheathing are critical to the successful performance of cold-formed steel buildings,” said Batista. “The main message of this paper is that those connections degrade due to fire and that such degradation can be experimentally characterized. This paper offers a method to estimate the initial stiffness and ultimate strength of cold-formed steel sheathing connections at elevated temperatures. This contribution is intended to help enabling performance-based analysis and design of cold-formed steel structures.”

Batista co-authored the paper with a professor from the Department of Structural Engineering, at the University of Campinas in Brazil and two other professors from the Department of Civil and Systems Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.

He said having this paper published in the journal is a significant accomplishment in his career.

“Beyond the solid reputation, strong international scope, and high impact of the Fire Safety Journal, we celebrate the opportunity to contribute to the record of research in the field and disseminate knowledge with the potential of advancing structural analysis and design methods,” Batista said.