Study Fosters Metal Building Design Safety

Study Fosters Metal Building Design Safety
Categories:
Metal Building History
Safety
A Purdue University study into steel building design and safety, funded by the National Science Foundation, used 3-D animation to provide visual context to the September 11 attacks.
A computer simulation of the World Trade Center attacks supported a federal agency's findings that the initial impact from the hijacked planes stripped away crucial fireproofing material and that the weakened towers collapsed under their own weight.
"One thing it does point out is the essential nature of fireproofing steel buildings," Christoph Hoffmann, a professor of computer science and one of the lead researchers on the project, told The Associated Press.
"This is something that wasn't done originally in the World Trade Center when it was built. It wasn't code at that time."
Mete Sozen, a professor of structural engineering and an investigator on the simulation, said Purdue researchers hope their work leads to better metal building structural design and codes to prevent similar collapses.
"In the unfortunate development that we shall have to design structures to survive such events, the methods we have developed and will be developing will be of great use to designers," Sozen said.
The animation, intended to help engineers design safer steel buildings, begins with a map of lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001.
The video then shows a chilling scene - a plane slicing through several stories of the north tower and follows a disintegrating plane through the interior and out the opposite side of the steel building.
The report concludes that the weight of the aircraft's fuel, when ignited, produced "a flash flood of flaming liquid" that knocked out a number of structural columns within the commercial metal building and removed the fireproofing insulation from other support structures.
Ayhan Irfanoglu, a Purdue professor of civil engineering, said half of the steel building's weight-bearing columns are concentrated at the cores of the towers "when that is wiped out, the structure comes down."
A 2005 report followed a three-year investigation by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a federal engineering agency, and recommended that cities raise fire standards for skyscrapers - and develop new materials that can better protect tall metal buildings from fire.
That analysis did not blame the collapse on the steel building frame or design of the towers, but focused on the fireproofing.
The animation is the latest project by the Purdue team to assess the damage from September 11. The team previously studied the impact of the crash into the Pentagon