So the windsor building is the closest comparison we can find.Or the Empire state building being hit by an airliner.
No it is noooooot......
The Windsor Tower or Torre Windsor (officially known as Edificio Windsor) was a 32-storey concrete building with a reinforced concrete central core. A typical floor was two-way spanning 280mm deep waffle slab supported by the concrete core, internal RC columns with additional 360mm deep steel I-beams and steel perimeter columns. Originally, the perimeter columns and internal steel beams were left unprotected in accordance with the Spanish building code at the time of construction
The building featured two heavily reinforced concrete transfer structures (technical floors) between the 2nd and 3rd Floors, and between the 16th and 17th Floors respectively. The original cladding system was fixed to the steel perimeter columns and the floor slabs. The perimeter columns were supported by the transfer structures at the 17th and 3rd Floor levels.
The Damage
The Windsor Tower was completely gutted by the fire on 12 February 2005. A large portion of the floor slabs above the 17th Floor progressively collapsed during the fire when the unprotected steel perimeter columns on the upper levels buckled and collapsed (see Figure 1). It was believed that the massive transfer structure at the 17th Floor level resisted further collapse of the building.
and the biggie:
On the other hand, the reinforced concrete central core, columns, waffle slabs and transfer structures performed very well in such a severe fire. It is clear that the structural integrity and redundancy of the remaining parts of the building provided the overall stability of the building.
There are a few things that were similar circumstantially:
Analysis
The main factors leading to the rapid fire growth and the fire spread to almost all floors included:
* the lack of effective fire fighting measures, such as automotive sprinklers
* the “open plan” floors with a floor area of 1000m2
* the failure of vertical compartmentation measures, in the façade system and the floor openings
but structurally the windsor tower is worthless as a comparative to the WTC.
Similar considerations have to be made to the empire state building, which incorporated masonry as part of the design.
What about the wtc steel testing where they heated the steel in a large building to twice the temperature of the wtc fires and the building didnt collapse
They were intended for providing a baseline performance gauge based on the known specifications of the design. Those tests were not intended to be representative of the conditions within the impact region, as far as I am aware.
Should we ignore every other case of Building Collapse from earthquake because the building was built differently and used different construction materials?
Should we not take into account Hurricanes and other forces as being comparative to the wtc.
No, I'm stating that in order to make a reasonable comparison you need to ask why certain buildings survived whereas the other failed. What differences in their design and circumstances contributed to their survival where the other failed? What can be seen as comparable and what cannot?
Take the windsor tower for example. As a whole it's incomparable to the WTC complex, because the concrete construction allowed the structure as a whole to perform exceedingly well despite the severity of the fires. The waffle slab framing is another important contributor to the building's stability. Performance wise you cannot compare the waffle slab & steel-reinforced concrete core to the trade center's nearly pure steel-framed design, nor can you compare it to the WTC structural framing which was unlike the madrid tower relegated to the core and the perimeter.
In principal however, I can illustrate that where there was unprotected steel, it failed catastrophically on those floors. and that the lack of active fire suppression and the unpartitioned space inside the towers offered similar conditions allowing the fires to spread in a similar fashion contributing to their severity.
So yes some things are similar, but they are not enough to justify the example as substantiating claims that the trade centers should not have collapsed
