- 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.