Why the observed motion history of world trade center towers is smooth / Jia-Liang Le in Journal of engineering mechanics, Vol. 137 N° 1 (Janvier 2011)  

Why the observed motion history of world trade center towers is smooth [texte imprimé] / Jia-Liang Le, Auteur ; Bažant, Zdeněk P., Auteur . - 2011 . - pp.82-84.
Mécanique appliquée
Langues : Anglais (eng)
in Journal of engineering mechanics > Vol. 137 N° 1 (Janvier 2011) . - pp.82-84

Mots-clés :	Structural dynamics failures Damage Monitoring Building high-rise New York City Velocity Imaging techniques.
Résumé :	The collapse of the World Trade Center towers was initiated by the impact of the upper falling part onto the underlying intact story. At the moment of impact, the velocity of the upper part must have decreased. The fact that no velocity decrease can be discerned in the videos of the early motion of the tower top has been recently exploited to claim that the collapse explanation generally accepted within the structural mechanics community was invalid. This claim is here shown to be groundless. Calculations show that the velocity drop is far too small to be perceptible in amateur video records and is much smaller than the inevitable error of such video records.
DEWEY :	620.1
ISSN :	0733-9399
En ligne :	http://ascelibrary.org/emo/resource/1/jenmdt/v137/i1/p82_s1?isAuthorized=no