Steel Inventory and Identification. Federal Building and Fire Safety Investigation of the World Trade Center Disaster.
Steel Inventory and Identification. Federal Building
and Fire Safety Investigation of the World Trade Center
Disaster.
(4292 K)
Banovic, S. W.
NIST NCSTAR 1-3B; 112 p. September 2005.
Keywords:
World Trade Center; high rise buildings; building
collapse; disasters; fire safety; fire investigations;
terrorists; terrorism; steels; identification;
inventory; structural elements; recovery; structural
steels; recovered
Abstract:
As a result of the recovery efforts of the Structural
Engineers Association of New York. Federal Emergency
Management Agency/American Society of Civil Engineers,
and the National Institute of Standards and Technology
(NIST), NIST possesses 236 structural steel elements
from the World Trade Center (WTC) buildings. These
samples include full exterior column panels, core
columns, portions of the floor truss members, channels
used to attach the floor trusses to the interior
columns, and other smaller structural components (e.g.,
bolts, diagonal bracing straps, aluminum facade). Many
significant pieces were recovered from the impact and
fire-affected floors. Additionally, the recovered
structural elements have yielded sufficient
representative samples, with respect to the
determination of the quality and mechanical properties
of the steel, for all 12 grades of the exterior panel
material, 2 grades of the core column material
(representing 99 percent by total number, of the
columns), and both grades for the floor truss material.
The lack of WT 7 steel precludes tests on actual
material from the structure; however, WTC 7 was
constructed of three grades of conventional steel (36
ksi. 42 ksi, and 50 ksi). and literature values may be
used to estimate properties.
Building and Fire Research Laboratory
National Institute of Standards and Technology
Gaithersburg, MD 20899