Design Aspects for Terrorist Resistant Buildings

INTRODUCTION
The design of civil or commercial buildings to withstand the effects of a terrorist blast is unlike the design of military installations or the design of embassy buildings. The objectives of the Structural Engineering Guidelines for the Design of New Embassy Buildings are to prevent heavy damage to components and structural collapse. Architectural and structural features play a significant role in determining how the building will respond to the blast loading. These features can include adjacent or underground parking, transfer girders, slab configurations, and structural-frame systems.

EXPECTED TERRORIST BLASTS ON STRUCTURES

External car bomb Internal car bomb Internal package Suicidal car bombs

MAJOR CAUSES OF LIFE LOSS AFTER THE BLAST

Flying Debris Broken glass Smoke and fire Blocked glass Power loss Communications breakdown Progressive Collapse of structure

GOALS OF BLAST RESISTANT DESIGN

Reduce the severity of injury Facilitate rescue Expedite repair Accelerate the speed of return to full operations

BASIC REQUIREMENTS TO RESIST BLAST LOADS

The first requirement is to determine the threat. The major threat is caused by terrorist bombings. The threat for a conventional bomb is defined by two equally important elements, The bomb size (or) charge weight, The standoff distance the minimum guaranteed distance between the blast source and the target Another requirement is to keep the bomb as far away as possible, by maximizing the keepout distance. No matter what size the bomb, the damage will be less severe the further the target is from the source.

TREATMENTS PROVIDED TO VARIOUS PARTS OF A STRUCTURE TO IMPROVE BLAST RESISTING MECHANISM FLOOR SLABS
1. More attention must be paid to the design and detailing of exterior bays and lower floors, which are the most susceptible to blast loads. 2. If vertical clearence is a problem, shear heads embedded in the slab will improve the shear resistance and improve the ability of the slab to transfer moments to the columns. 3. In exterior bays/lower floors, drop panels and column capitols are required to shorten the effective slab length and improve the punching shear resistance.

4. The slab-column interface should contain closed-hoop stirrup reinforcement properly anchored around flexural bars within a prescribed distance from the column face. 5. Bottom reinforcement must be provided continuous through the column. This reinforcement serves to prevent brittle failure at the connection and provides an alternate mechanism for developing shear transfer once the concrete has punched through.

COLUMNS
1. The potential for direct lateral loading on the face of the columns, resulting from the blast pressure and impact of explosive debris, requires that the lower floor columns be designed with adequate ductility and strength. 2. The perimeter columns supporting the lower floors must also be designed to resist this extreme blast effect. 3. Encasing these lower floor columns in a steel jacket will provide confinement, increase shear capacity, and improve the columns ductility and strength. An alternative, which provides similar benefits, is to embed a steel column within the perimeter concrete columns or wall sections.

Steel Jacket

4. For smaller charge weights, spiral reinforcement provides a measure of core confinement that greatly improves the capacity and the behaviour of the reinforced concrete columns under extreme load.

TRANSFER GIRDERS
The building relies on transfer girders at the top of the atrium to distribute the loads of the columns above the atrium to the adjacent columns outside the atrium. The transfer girder spans the width of the atrium, which insures a column-free architectural space for the entrance to the building. Transfer girders typically concentrate the loadbearing system into a smaller number of structural element

 The column connections, which support the transfer girders, are to provide sustained strength despite inelastic deformations.

SHEAR WALLS
Use a well-distributed lateral-load resisting mechanism in the horizontal floor plan. This can be accomplished by using several shear walls around the plan of the building. This will improve the overall seismic as well as the blast behaviour of the building.

If adding more shear walls is not architecturaly feasible, a combined lateral-load resisting mechanism can also be used. A central shear wall and a perimeter momentresisting frame will provide for a balanced solution.The perimeter moment-resisting frame will require strengthening the spandrel beams and the connections

to the outside columns. This will also result in better protection of the outside columns.

LOWER FLOOR EXTERIOR

The architectural design of the building of interest currently calls for window glass around the first floor. Unless this area is constructed in reinforced concrete, the damage to the lower floor structural elements and their connections will be quite severe. Consequently, the injury to the lower floor inhabitants will be equally severe. Two sizes of charges can be discussed, 1. To protect against a small charge weight, a nominal 300 mm ( 12 in. ) thick wall with 0.3% steel doubly reinforced in both directions might be required. 2. For intermediate charge weight protection, a 460 mm ( 18 in. ) thick wall with 0.5% steel might be needed.

STAND OFF DISTANCE

The keep out distance, within which explosives-laden vehicles may not penetrate, must be maximized and guaranteed. As we all know, the greater the standoff distance, the more the blast forces will dissipate resulting in reduced pressures on the building. Several recommendations can be made to maintain and improve the standoff distance for the building under consideration. Use anti-ram bollards or large planters, placed around the entire perimeter. These barriers must be designed to resist the maximum vehicular impact load that could be imposed. For maximum effectiveness, the barriersbollards or planters must be placed at the curb.

 The public parking lot at the corner of the building must be secured to guarantee the prescribed keepout distance from the face of the structure. Preferably, the parking lot should be eliminated. Street parking should not be permitted on the near side of the street, adjacent to the building.

The collapse of the World Trade Centre ( WTC ) towers on September 11, 2001, was as sudden as it was dramatic; the complete destruction of such massive buildings shocked nearly everyone. Immediately afterward and even today , there is widespread speculation that the buildings were structurally deficient, that the steel columns melted, or that the fire suppression equipment failed to operate.

THE DESIGN
The towers were designed and built in the mid1960s through the early 1970s. Each tower was 64 m square, standing 411 m above street level and 21 m below grade. This produces a height-to-width ratio of 6.8. The total weight of the structure was roughly 500,000t. The building is a huge sail that must resist a 225 km/h hurricane. It was designed to resist a wind load of 2 kPa-a total of lateral load of 5,000t. In order to make each tower capable of withstanding this wind load, the architects selected a lightweight perimeter tube design consisting of 244 exterior columns of 36 cm square steel box section on 100 cm centers.

This permitted windows more than one-half metre wide.Inside this outer tube there was a 27 m x 40 m core which was designed to support the weight of the tower. It also housed the elevators, the stairwells, and the mechanical risers and utilities. Web joists 80 cm tall connected the core to the perimeter at each story. Concrete slabs were poured over these joists to form the floors. In essence, the building is an egg-crate construction,i.e. 95 percent air. The egg-crate construction made a redundant structure ( i.e., if one or two columns were lost, the loads would shift into adjacent columns and the building would remain standing ). The WTC was primarily a lightweight steel structure; however, its 244 perimeter columns made it one of the most redundant and one of the most resilient skyscrapers.

DETAILS OF THE COLLAPSE

The early news reports noted how well the towers withstood the initial impact of the aircraft; however, when one recognizes that the buildings had more than 1,000 times the mass of the aircraft and had been designed to resist steady wind loads of 30 times the weight of the aircraft, this ability to withstand the initial impact is hardly surprising. Furthermore, since there was no significant wind on September 11, the outer perimeter columns were only stressed before the impact to around 1/3 of their 200 MPa design allowable. While the aircraft impact undoubtedly destroyed several columns in the WTC perimeter wall, the number of

columns lost on the initial impact was not large and the loads were shifted to remaining columns in this highly redundant structure. Of equal or even greater significance during this initial impact was the explosion when 90,000 L gallons of jet fuel, comprising nearly 1/3 of the aircrafts weight, ignited. The ensuing fire was clearly the principle cause of the collapse.

The perimeter tube design of the WTC was highly redundant. It survived the loss of several exterior columns due to aircraft impact, but the ensuing fire led to other steel failures. Many structural engineers believe that the weak points were the angle clips that held the floor joists between the columns on the perimeter wall and the core structure.

With a 700 Pa floor design allowable, each floor should have been able to support approximately 1,300 t beyond its own weight. The total weight of each tower was about 500,000 t. As the joists on one or two of the most heavily burned floors gave away and the outer box columns began to bow outward, the floors above them also fell. The floor below ( with its 1,300 t design capacity ) could not support the roughly 45,000 t of ten floors ( or more ) above crashing down on these angle clips. This started the domino effect that caused the buildings to collapse within ten seconds, hitting bottom with an estimated speed of 200 km per hour.

CAN BUILDINGS RESIST DIRECT AIRPLANE HITS

If the design terrorist attack is similar to that of Sept. 11, can buildings be given the capacity to meet this demand? To answer this question, it is important to understand the physics at work when a plane in flight is stopped by a building. To stop a Boeing 767 travelling in excess of 500 miles per hour in a distance of a few feet would take a deceleration force in excess of 400 million pounds. Each Tower of the World Trade Centre was designed for a total horizontal force of about 15 million pounds. The total design wind load for a more commonly sized high-rise,say, 40 stories tall, would be about 4 million pounds. Another part of the answer to this question lies in the way that the exterior of the building was structured. The exterior columns were 14-inch square welded steel box columns spaced at 40 inches on center. This means that there was only 26 inches clear between each column. The columns were integral with the steel spandrels beams and

formed essentially a solid wall of steel with perforations for windows. Can buildings be designed for direct airplane hits? Yes and no. Yes, for small aircraft. A definite no, for large commercial aircraft.

HOW CAN WE MINIMIZE THE CHANCE OF PROGRESSIVE COLLAPSE

Because the towers ultimately collapsed with one floor crashing down upon the next, it has been called a progressive collapse. In the case of the World Trade Centre there were about 40 columns lost on one face of each of the towers and there was no propogation of collapse from this loss. A New York fire chief wrote that experienced fire fighters know that the buildings that are most susceptible to progressive collapse are buildings that are well tied together ( i.e., able to transfer building loads from one element to another, such as a column ). Yet, virtually every structural engineer will advise that one of the best ways to prevent progressive collapse is to tie the buildings together. The difference is that the engineer is thinking about losing a column or two and the fire chief is talking about losing a whole part of a building.

 At least six safety systems present in the World Trade Center towers were completely and immediately disabled or destroyed upon impact: fireproofing, automatic sprinklers, compartmentalization and pressurization, lightning, structure and exit stairs.

CONCLUSION
There are structural techniques that can increase the capacity of building structures to resist certain kinds of terrorist attacks. However, there is absolutely no reliable way to design for the impact of a large scale commercial airliner.