October 19, 2006; 6:30pm-9:00pm
Country Inn & Suites, Sunnyvale
Dr. Robert T. Bocchieri
Principal Engineer
Applied Research Associates, Inc.
Mountain View, CA
[At right:
Second aircraft hits WTC Towers at 9:02am, September 11, 2001.]
The Federal Building and Fire Safety Investigation of the World Trade Center Disaster was recently completed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). A critical component of the investigation was to analyze the aircraft impacts into the World Trade Center (WTC) towers to evaluate the impact-induced damage to the towers. This impact damage established initial conditions for the fire dynamics modeling, thermal-structural response, and collapse initiation analyses performed as part of the NIST investigation into the collapse of the WTC towers.
Development of the WTC tower and aircraft models and associated analysis methodologies used to simulate the aircraft impact response will be presented. The analyses performed span the range from laboratory-scale material testing up to the global aircraft impact response of the WTC towers. Simulations were performed at various levels of refinement. Component analyses were performed using small portions of the aircraft and tower. In these analyses, components were modeled with a fine resolution to investigate the details of the initial impact and breakup behavior. Results from the component analyses were used to develop the simulation techniques required for the global analysis of the aircraft impacts. The global impact simulation techniques were aimed at reducing the overall global model size while maintaining fidelity in the impact response. The aircraft and tower models are capable of reproducing both the loads and damage from an initial impact as well as the subsequent loading produced by secondary impacts after the break-up of the aircraft from the debris and fuel cloud. The accuracy of the calculated aircraft impact damage was evaluated by comparison with observed impact damage to the towers.

Dr. Robert Bocchieri is a principal engineer in the Silicon Valley Office of Applied Research Associates, Mountain View, and a senior member of AIAA. He is responsible for managing and developing research projects in the field of solids and structural mechanics. His current and past research includes large-scale simulations of geometric and material nonlinear dynamic behavior using the explicit finite element code LS-DYNA. He has worked on aircraft impact modeling of the World Trade Center Towers, methods for dynamic characterization of composite materials, computational progressive damage and failure modeling of composite pressure vessels exposed to intense localized heating, highway barrier crashworthiness, earth-penetrating weapon systems, and the dynamic pulse-buckling of plates and shells exposed to impulsive blast loading.
He received his Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2001, and was named the winner of the AIAA Abe M. Zaram Award in Astronautics in 1998.
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| On or before Oct. 12 |
After Oct. 12 | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Members and their guests | $25 | $30 | |
| Non-members | $35 | $40 | |
| Full-Time Students | $15 | $20 | |
| K-12 Teachers | $15 | $20 |
Registration and no-host cocktails at 6:30 pm; buffet dinner at 7:00 pm; program starts at 7:30 pm; program ends at 9:00 pm. This meeting is open to the general public.
For more information about this meeting, contact
Todd Farley at: chair(at)aiaa-sf.org.
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Hotel lobby: 37 deg 24.58 min N, 112 deg 00.14 min W
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