9/11 Model Backs Up Tower Collapse Theory

A two-year study of the World Trade Center Towers’ collapse by Purdue University has reaffirmed the findings of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which suggested that the buildings crashed under their own weight after crucial support columns and fireproofing were damaged or destroyed. The research team released an animation of the first plane’s collision to visualize their research.

Watch the animation:

AP via Yahoo!:



Read more

Simulation finds 9/11 fireproofing key

By STEVE HERMAN, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 49 minutes ago

INDIANAPOLIS - A computer simulation of the 2001 World Trade Center attacks supports a federal agency's findings that the initial impact from the hijacked airplanes stripped away crucial fireproofing material and that the weakened towers collapsed under their own weight.

The two-year Purdue University study, funded in part by the National Science Foundation, was the first to use 3-D animation to provide visual context to the attacks, said Christoph Hoffmann, a professor of computer science and one of the lead researchers on the project.

"One thing it does point out... is the absolute essential nature of fireproofing steel structures," Hoffmann 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 a lead investigator on the simulation, said Purdue researchers hope their work leads to better structural design and building 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 in part to help engineers design safer buildings, begins with a map of lower Manhattan as it appeared on Sept. 11, 2001. The video then shows a plane slicing through several stories of the World Trade Center's north tower and follows the disintegrating plane through the interior and out the opposite side.

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 building and removed the fireproofing insulation from other support structures, Hoffmann said.

The simulation also found that the airplane's metal skin peeled away shortly after impact and shows how the titanium jet engine shafts flew through the building like bullets.

Ayhan Irfanoglu, a Purdue professor of civil engineering, said half of the building's weight-bearing columns were concentrated at the cores of the towers.

"When that part is wiped out, the structure comes down," Irfanoglu said. "We design structures with some extra capacity to cover some uncertainties, but we never anticipate such heavy demand coming from an aircraft impact. If the columns were distributed, maybe, the fire could not take them out so easily."

A 2005 report following a three-year investigation by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a federal engineering agency, recommended that cities raise fire standards for skyscrapers and develop new materials that can better protect tall buildings from fire. That analysis did not blame the collapse on the steel or design of the towers, but instead focused on the damage to the fireproofing.

Shyam Sunder, the lead NIST investigator, said he was aware of the Purdue study and called it and his own agency's study "among probably the most prominent analyses that have been conducted in the United States."

The animation is the latest project by the Purdue team to assess the structural damage from the Sept. 11 attacks. The team also studied the impact of the crash into the Pentagon.

___

On the Net:

See the Purdue study:

http://www.cs.purdue.edu/news/6-15-07WTC.htm

Scientifically based animation of 9/11 attacks a challenge for CS servers

A Purdue University June 12th news release available at http://news.uns.purdue.edu/x/2007a/070612HoffmannWTC.html announced recent work on 9/11 visualizations done by a team of Purdue's computer scientists and civil World Trade Center Simulation Photoengineers. The scientifically based animation of the 9/11 attack was developed by Professor Chris Hoffmann to help engineers study the effects of the twin towers following the terrorist attack. The recent version of the video is enhanced with a translator application developed by Professor Voicu Popescu. The translator creates a link between computer simulations and computer visualization systems to automatically translate simulation data into a more realistic 3-D animation scene.

The updated version of the 9/11 video had been available on the CS web site beginning April 16, 2007. The download rates of this large video file (122MB) averaged only a few each day. However, the CS internet web servers started to sweat shortly after Purdue announced this state-of-the-art 9/11 animated visualization video. The Purdue press release about the visualization work was picked up by various news sites, including physorg.com and the popular digg.com. The results were immediate. CS Facilities and Network Administrator, Dan Trinkle said, "At about 5:00pm the CS web server started receiving about 1500 hits an hour. If they were all World Trade Center Simulation Photosuccessful, that would have been about 190 GB per hour of file transfer." During the 8:00am-9:00am hour the next morning, the video had over 7900 hits -- almost 1TB if successful. The CS server was not able to serve the file quickly enough, so browsers would time out. Most of the hits at that time were only partial transfers so the high number could be attributed to retries.

At first, CS replaced the video with an error message (small text file). Researchers then uploaded the video to YouTube. Trinkle comments, "This site is better able to handle widespread distribution of videos." Once that was done, CS configured the server to redirect requests to the YouTube location.

For the rest of the day, CS saw access rates over 700 per hour and as high as 2000 per hour redirecting requests to YouTube. By the end of the day CS had handled over 38,000 hits from over 16,000 different sites. By Thursday, June 14th most people were accessing the video directly from YouTube. The YouTube video has been viewed over 87,000 times.

At the end of the day, regardless of whether the planes did this and that was all natural, it does not change the fact that that part is just what is known as, minutia.
Same with the other two planes.

Because it makes people argue, is this is that

But the important part is then forgotten, which is-
Who was behind the 19 so-called by some pilots, so called by other bumblers, because that is the important point

What did George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and yes, the bushfamilyinc. know and when did they know it. That is the one and only truth that is needed. The rest is minutia.
Did (and W did not have to know or be part of anything)

But Did the administration or other higher-ups know and when and what did they know. And how did they know, and how did they do it.

We know where and if the offical story is not true, we also know why.

We need to know What they knew, and when they knew it. That's all. Simple as that. Doesn't matter if the heat took the buildings down, a beacon was in the planes, or other minutia.
Just tell us

What did they know, and when did they know it. And who knew it then. Who, What, When. We want the truth and a new investigation under oath, with supoena power to find 3 simple answers.