Engineering Perspective of the Collapse of WTC-I
Publication: Journal of Performance of Constructed Facilities
Volume 22, Issue 1
Abstract
The writers report on a simulation study of the performance of the North Tower (WTC-I) of the World Trade Center complex during the impact of American Airlines Flight 11 on September 11, 2001. We discuss impact damage that the structural core might have sustained and its possible behavior under structural and thermal loading. Our simulations indicate that the worst damage to the core structure was in stories 95 through 97 of the tower. We estimate that a core collapse mechanism could be initiated if the tower core column temperatures were elevated to about .
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Acknowledgments
The writers thank Professor Mete A. Sozen for his insight and invaluable support throughout the project. Graduate research assistants Paul A. Rosen, Ingo Brachmann, and Oscar A. Ardila-Giraldo developed the numerical models and executed the computer simulations. Konstantinos Miamis provided the base study on the thermal behavior of columns. This project is supported in part by NSF-ITR Grant No. DSC-0325227. Infrastructure support for the large-scale simulations was provided in part by the Northwest Indiana Computational Grid, by the Network for Computational Nanotechnology of Purdue University, and by the Bowen Laboratory for Civil Engineering.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Performance of Constructed Facilities
Volume 22 • Issue 1 • February 2008
Pages: 62 - 67
Copyright
© 2008 ASCE.
History
Received: Feb 21, 2007
Accepted: May 11, 2007
Published online: Feb 1, 2008
Published in print: Feb 2008
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