Fire Tests of Single Office Workstations. Federal Building and Fire Safety Investigation of the World Trade Center Disaster.
Fire Tests of Single Office Workstations. Federal
Building and Fire Safety Investigation of the World
Trade Center Disaster.
(6137 K)
Ohlemiller, T. J.; Mulholland, G. W.; Maranghides, A.;
Filliben, J. J.; Gann, R. G.
NIST NCSTAR 1-5C; 130 p. September 2005.
Keywords:
World Trade Center; high rise buildings; building
collapse; disasters; fire safety; fire investigations;
terrorists; terrorism; office buildings; fire tests;
fire models; large scale fire tests; reconstruction;
computer simulation; combustibles
Abstract:
Reconstruction of the fires that occurred in the World
Trade Center (WTC) 1, 2, and 7 on September 11. 2001,
relied heavily on computer simulations because
examination of the post-fire premises was not possible
and the information from eyewitness accounts was
severely limited in nature. These simulations were
performed using the National Institute of Standards and
Technology (NIST) Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS). This
report describes a series of six fire tests of single
workstations (i.e.. office cubicles), the dominant
combustibles in the WTC buildings. The purpose was to
understand how the office workstations may have burned
and to provide data for improvements in the FDS
combustion algorithm and its inputs needed to
approximate the burning of combustibles as complex as
those that comprise an office workstation. The variables
in the tests were the type of workstation, the presence
of jet fuel on combustible surfaces, and the presence of
inert material covering part of the combustible
surfaces. The outcome was a pragmatic, empirical
approach to modeling the burning behavior that led to
satisfactory replication of the heat release rate from
the workstations and the dependence of that rate on the
test variables.
