The collapse of the World Trade Towers The World Trade towers were built from the mid-1960s

through the early 1970s in lower east Manhattan in New York City. It was deigned by architecture Minoru Yamasaki and Emery Roth & Sons, and it were engineered by Leslie E. Robertson Associates. The World Trade Towers collapsed on September 9, 2001 due to a terrorist attack. According to National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States the attack involved receiving impacts from an airplane that carried 92 passengers into the north tower and another airplane that carried 65 passengers into the south tower. Within two hours, both towers have completely collapsed downwards. The attack caused a total of 2060 deaths. Also, besides immediate death, the fall of the towers caused a wide spread of toxic dust and smoke into the neighborhood, which affects victims even today by causing breathing and lung problems that are treatable but usually incurable. The Cost of September 11 stated that the collapse of World Trade Towers cost 3 to 4.5 billion dollars to properly deconstruct and clean up. And since the World Trade Towers are occupied by businesses in a very populated area, the collapse of both towers caused New York City to lose 95 billion dollars from job lost, taxes lost, damage to infrastructure and clean up. Because the reason of collapse is not related to the buildings material structure but because planes hit them, investigations were not made on the construction department but on homeland security. Due to the amount of lives lost and money spent, the collapses of World Trade Towers was one of the biggest lost in New York State. According to the The Minerals, Metals, & Materials Society article written by Eagar, Thomas W, the World Trade Towers did not contain flaws in its initial design. Each tower had an area of 64 meters square, an above ground height of 411 meters, and a below ground depth of 21 meters. These buildings were designed to resist a wind load of 2000 Pascal. Both buildings were constructed by using a lightweight perimeter tube consisting of 244 exterior columns, each column with 36 centimeter square steel box section on 100 centimeter centers. Inside the outer tubes were a 27 meters by 40 meters core that supported the weight of the tower. Additionally, 80 centimeters tall web joists connected the core to the perimeter, which were covered with concrete slabs to form the floors of the towers. These aspects are displayed in the following image. These concrete slabs also act as a fireproofing mechanism.he design ensured that if one or two columns in these buildings were to be destroyed then the load of the rest of the tower would shift to adjacent columns and the building would remain standing, which did occur when the airplane took crashed into the towers. Sadly, the designers did not, and should not have anticipated for a plane crashing into the towers, thus the buildings still fell in the end. The towers itself was 1000 times the mass of the airplane and could resist wind loads 30 times more the weight of the airplane. The airplanes destroyed multiple columns in the perimeter wall of both buildings, but the impacts were not large enough hence the remaining columns were able to support the towers from collapsing. The next big impact was from the explosion caused by the ignition of 90,000 L gallons of jet fuel that created a massive fire in the towers. Regarding fire, the two towers are designed to withstand office fire for up to 3 hours with non-functional sprinklers, which is more than enough time to evacuate

everyone and for the fire department to eliminate the flames. But the size of the flames from the plane crash was a lot bigger than the expected size of a typical office fire; hence the buildings could not withstand it. Eagar, Thomas W stated that the type of flame that engulfed the World Trade Towers was categorized as diffuse flame because of the presence of black smokes that surrounded the towers. Diffuse flame is a flame where the fuel and oxidant are not mixed before ignition and combust when the fuel/oxidant ratios reach a flammable range. If the unmixed fuel and oxidant starts out at standard temperature and with pure oxygen, it can reach a maximum temperature of 3000 Celsius. But since air was present instead of pure oxygen, the maximum temperature is reduced by two-thirds; resulting in a maximum temperature of 1000 Celsius. However, it is also difficult to reach maximum temperature with diffuse flames because there is nothing to ensure the ratio of fuel/oxidant to reach flammable range. With typical residential fire of diffuse flames, the range is usually from 500 to 600 Celsius. Since steel begins to soften around 425 Celsius and loses half its strength at 650 Celsius, the high temperature from the flames is a cause for the structure to undergo loss of strength and stiffness; also known as thermal softening. Also from the lost of stiffness, there will be an increase of deformability of the steel, which is known as thermal creep [Buyukozturk Oral, and Franz-Josef Ulm, author of Minerals and Structure]. Another theory from Eagar, Thomas W is from the fact that temperature of the flames was not uniform because the temperature on the outside of the box columns was lower than the side facing the flames. This produced yield-level residual stresses, which produced distortion in the steel structure. Thus resulting in buckling failure. Any of these reasons mention in this paragraph can possibility explain why the rest of the buildings structure had to fail. The towers stayed standing for a few hours because of supporting adjacent columns, however due to overload stress on the supporting columns, eventually all the columns collapsed. Besides the issue of failing columns, the floor was also falling apart due to thermal softening, deformability, and distortion of the floor material [Buyukozturk Oral and Franz-Josef Ulm]. Once the column and floor of one level fails, it created a domino affect where the upper levels fall on the lower levels, which cause the lower level to fall on the level below it until all the levels crash on top of the lowest level. The reason why the building did not collapsed to the side was because the 500,000-ton towers had too much inertia to fall in any other direction but straight down. Buyukozturk Oral and Franz-Josef Ulm stated that the overall structure of the World Trade Towers contained a high level of redundancy against failures. Meaning that there are too many supporting schemes for one flaw. Under normal circumstances, the towers would not have collapsed, but since the heat released by the explosion caused the most structural failure; ways to prevent the collapse of the towers would be to increase defense against fire. The original scheme of fireproofing the structure by covering important materials with cement was only capable of withstanding tiny outburst of flames when compared to the huge explosion ignited by the jet fuels. Buyukozturk Oral and Franz-Josef Ulm suggested that a way to prevent structural failure is to use fiber reinforced concrete to coat the steels because normal concrete develop thermal damage and softening similarly as steel. According to them, fiber

enforced materials can increase thermal inertia, increase mechanical resistance to blast loading, and have structural load bearing capacity when the steel member thermally softens. However, unless it is known that there would be a great explosion, it would not be wise to use fiber-reinforced materials because those are expensive to obtain. Also, in the past there was another terrorist attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on 19 April 1995 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The building was built using reinforced concrete that cost 14.5 million dollars [Oklahoma Department of Civil Emergency Management], which is stronger than the concrete use in World Trade Tower. But due to bombing, the building also was damaged. This shows that even if we are using better materials, it is still not defendable toward high explosives. In the end, the World Trade Towers were not considered a failed design because if an airplane had not struck it, it would still be standing strong today and probably many years after.