Eerie NRO Simulation On 9/11/01 PDF Free Download

Eerie NRO Simulation On 9/11/01 PDF Download Info

Aside From The Various Military Drills Going On That Day, September 11, 2001, There Was A National Reconnaissance Office Drill Underway As Well. A Small Plane Would Suffer A Mechanical Failure And Crash Into One Of The Agency’s Towers In The Scenario.

Eerie NRO Simulation On 9/11/01 PDF Free Download

Though Most Americans Have Decided What Brought Down The Twin Buildings Of The World Trade Center On September 11, 2001, Civil Engineers Still Continue Asking Questions That May Someday Help Save Lives.

The Structural Engineers Would Need To Understand From A Scientific Basis What Happened To The Structures During The Terrorist Attacks So That Such Problems Could Be Avoided In The Future. Scientists At Purdue University Have Created A State-of-the-art, Animated Visualization To Help In This Continuing Pursuit Of Answers.

The Animation Does Give Access To A Good Deal More Information Than Could A Scientific Simulation, Said Christoph Hoffmann, Head Of Purdue’s Rosen Center For Advanced Computing, An Information Technology Division. Hoffmann Is A Professor Of Computer Science.

“Scientific Simulations Constrain Us To Only Visualize Those Things That Are Absolutely Necessary To The Engineer,” Says Hoffmann. This Provides Us With A Simulation That Promises To Communicate Very Little Visual Information To The Lay Audience. Our Animation Reparables The Lost Visual Information Of The Scientific Model In A Way To Enable Effective Communication.

It Took Many Test Runs Of The Scientific Simulation—whose Results Were Revealed Last September—with Which The Researchers Finally Were Satisfied; That Final Test Run Consumed More Than 80 Hours Of Computing At High Performance.

The Simulation Shows How The Weight Of The Fuel Acted To Create A Flash Flood Of Flaming Liquid That Blew Out Crucial Structural Columns In The Building And Blew Off Fireproofing Insulation From Other Support Structures.

The Jet Cut Through Dozens Of Stories Of The North Tower Of The World Trade Center In Less Than Half A Second. In The Simulation, The Airplane And Building Were Represented By Lines And Dots During The Impact.

Voicu Popescu, An Assistant Professor Of Computer Science, Developed A Translator Program That Connects Computer Simulations And Computer Visualization Systems So Simulation Data Can Be Automatically Translated Into A 3-d Animation Scene. That Let Popescu Build The New Animated Visualization.

“This Translator Is General And Can Be Applied In Other Simulations,” Popescu Says.

Though The Visualization Doesn’t Include The Aftereffects Of The Fire, Features Like Smoke And Flames — Things That Were Absent In The Scientific Simulation — Are Plainly On Show In The Animation.

Popescu Says That Despite Information Being Added, The Rendering Was Still Deliberately Kept “Non-descript” To Avoid Them Capitalizing On The Tragic Event.

“For Instance, On The Airplane There Are No Airline Insignia Or Windows,” Popescu Says.

But Despite This, He Said, The Visualization Offers A Level Of Realism Never Before Seen.

“The Crashes And Computer Models You Often See On Television Are Not Scientifically Accurate,” He Said. “This Provides An Alternative That Is Useful To The Nonexpert But Is Also Scientifically Accurate, So It Provides A More Realistic Picture Of The Event.”

It Opens With A Google Earth Map Of Lower Manhattan As It Was On September 11, 2001. The Film Then Goes Ahead To Show The Damage The Aircraft Produced As It Struck The North Tower And Then Tracks The Disintegrating Aircraft Through The Inside, With Ending Scenes Of The Metal Of The Airplane, Ignited Gasoline, Smoke, And Dust Leaving The Building On The Other Side.

It Simulated How Titanium Jet Engine Shafts Shot Through The Building Like Bullets, And How The Metal Skin Ripped Off The Airplane Within Seconds Of Impact.
The World Trade Center Simulation, Much Like Another This Team Of Researchers Did To Model The Pentagon Assault On September 11, 2001, Showed That It Was The Weight Of The 10,000 Gallons Of Fuel That Became The Chief Culprit In Causing The Destruction.

“It Is The Weight, The Kinetic Energy Of The Fuel That Causes So Much Of The Damage In These Incidents,” Hoffmann Says. “If It Weren’t For The Ensuing Fire, The Structural Damage Might Be Almost The Same If The Planes Had Been Filled With Water Instead Of Fuel.”

Mete Sozen, Chief Investigator Of The Simulation Project And The Kettlehut Distinguished Professor Of Structural Engineering At Purdue University, Said That The Researchers Harnessed The Power Of State-of-the-art Computational Capabilities Coupled With Years Of Labor And Sweat To Be Able To Replicate The Event.

“To Estimate The Serious Damage To The World Trade Center Core Columns, We Pieced Together A Detailed Numerical Model Of The Impacting Aircraft And A Detailed Numerical Model Of The Top 20 Stories Of The Building,” Sozen Says. “We Would Then Use Weeks Of Supercomputer Time Over A Number Of Years To Simulate The Event In Many Credible Angles Of Impact Of The Aircraft.”

As Described By Sozen, The Damage Indicated By The Numerical Simulation Was Exactly The Same As The Real Damage To A Building’s Exterior.

“We Benchmarked Our Simulations Against Experiments We Had Run To Measure The Energy Transferred From High-speed Fluid To Solid Targets,” He Said. “So We Felt Quite Confident That The Damage Map We Would Calculate For Our Numerical Model Of The Building Would Be A Close Match For The Actual Damage.”

A Network Of Hundreds Of Thousands Of “Finite Elements,” Or Small Squares With Unique Physical Properties, Which Were Joined Together To Model The Plane And Its Mass. The Visualization Will Illustrate Exactly How The Gasoline️ Ignited—by These Scientific Data Points—to Show How Aircraft Parts Swept Through The Building And Out The Other Side.