- Author
- Prasad, K. R. | Hamins, A. | McAllister, T. | Gross, J. L.
- Title
- Fire Induced Thermal and Structural Response of the World Trade Center Towers.
- Coporate
- National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD
- Book or Conf
- Fire Safety Science. Proceedings. Ninth (9th) International Symposium. International Association for Fire Safety Science (IAFSS). September 21-26, 2008, Intl. Assoc. for Fire Safety Science, Boston, MA, Karlsruhe, Germany, Karlsson, B., Editors, 1267-1278 p., 2008
- Keywords
- fire safety | fire science | World Trade Center | structural response | structural design | vapor phases | energy release rate | load bearing elements | methodology | computational fluid dynamics | fire growth | thermal analysis | structures | compartments | steel structures | floors | impact | damage | aircraft fires | experiments | equations | fire dynamics | thermal response | temperature | high rise buildings | trusses | concrete clabs | columns | buckling | building collapse | fire load
- Identifiers
- World Trade Center (110-story-high) Towers, Manhattan, New York, September 11, 2001; aircraft impact damage and fires; Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS); large fire laboratory experiments; percentage difference between peak values of the measured and the simulated steel surface temperatures; percentage difference between peak values of the measured and the simulated steel temperatures; thermal response of the perimeter columns; thermal response of the floor trusses and core beams
- Abstract
- Over the past several years, there has been a resurgence of interest in studying the response of building structures to fires. Simulations of the effects of severe fires on the structural integrity of buildings requires a close coupling between the gas phase energy release and transport phenomena and the stress analysis in the load bearing materials. A methodology has been developed for coupling CFD simulations of fire growth with finite element models for thermal analysis and for using the thermal data to compute the demand-to-capacity ratio in a multi-story structure. A simple radiative transport model that assumes the compartment is divided locally into a hot, soot laden upper layer and a cool, relatively clear lower layer is employed to predict radiative fluxes incident on sub-grid scale structural members. Thermal response coupled with realistic fire simulations of various steel structural components on floors of World Trade Center Tower 1 that were subjected to aircraft impact damage and fires are presented. The thermal response was used to compute the reduction in load carrying capacity of the structural components as a function of time, which ultimately results global collapse of the towers.