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Engineering Perspective of the Collapse of WTC-I |
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| Authors: | Ayhan Irfanoglu Christoph M Hoffmann |
| Affiliation: | 1Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering, School of Civil Engineering, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette, IN 47907. E-mail: ayhan@purdue.edu 2Professor of Computer Science and Director of Rosen Center for Advanced Computing, Dept. of Computer Science, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907. E-mail: cmh@cs.purdue.edu |
| 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 700°C. |
| Keywords: | Collapse Computer aided simulation Impact loads Structural analysis Structural failures Thermal analysis |