Abstract: This article points out the benefits of employing a performance based analysis approach for ascertaining the likelihood that travelling fires in an office building could induce a localized failure that might trigger its collapse. The case study chosen is Building 7 of the World Trade Center complex. Based on the parametric study undertaken, our findings were that the fire-protected steel floor beam, identified as the initiator of the cascade of events that followed, could not have done so, virtually under any circumstance.

Read at the Challenge Journal of Structural Mechanics.