An official website of the United States government
Here’s how you know
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock (
) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is conducting a two year investigation of the World Trade Center disaster. Among numerous tasks, computer simulations of the fires are being conducted to provide structural engineers with a detailed description of the gas and steel temperatures. In support of the computer simulation, large scale fire experiments are being conducted to both validate the model and to generate input data describing the thermal properties of the contents of the buildings. The results of the calculations are being compared to photographs and videos of the fires. Thousands of pictures and hundreds of hours of videotape have been analyzed to produce a detailed window-by-window timeline of the fires' progress.
McGrattan, K.
and Bouldin, C.
(2004),
Simulating the Fires in the World Trade Center, Interflam, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=861304
(Accessed June 6, 2023)