Using OpenSees for structures in fire

OpenSees is an open source object oriented software framework developed at UC Berekeley and currently supported by PEER and Nees. OpenSees has so far been focussed on providing an advanced computational tool for analysing the non-linear response of structural frames subjected to seismic excitations. Given that OpenSees is open source (available for free download at opensees.berkeley.edu) and has been available for best part of this decade it has spawned a rapidly growing community of users as well as developers who have added to it's capabilities over this period. For instance it has significant geotechnical modelling capabilities developed by this community so that the seismic response analyses can include full soil structure interaction if required. It also has a structural reliability and sensitivity analysis capability offering many reliability calculation tools. Furthermore it has an HPC or parallel version for solving large problems on high-performance computing hardware. In addition to it's availability as an analysis tool OpenSees is also the software platform of choice for the US NEES network that enables earthquake engineers to organise and share data, participate in remote experiments, and perform hybrid simulations. It therefore represents the largest community of this kind in structural engineering and has the potential to bring together the best structural engineering computational modeling capabilities under one platform accessible to all facilitating new collaborations across geographical boundaries to solve ever more challenging problems.