Structural Design
The towers were designed as "tube in tube" structures, which provided tenants with open floor plans uninterrupted by columns or walls. Numerous, closely spaced perimeter columns provided much of the strength to the structure, along with gravity load shared with the steel box columns of the core. Above the tenth floor, there were 59 perimeter columns along each face of the building, and there were 47 heavier columns in the core. All of the elevators and stairwells were located in the core, leaving a large column-free space between the perimeter that was bridged by prefabricated floor trusses.
The floors consisted of 4 inches (10 cm) lightweight concrete slabs laid on a fluted steel deck. A grid of lightweight bridging trusses and main trusses supported the floors with shear connections to the concrete slab for composite action. The trusses had a span of 60 feet (18 m) in the long-span areas and 35 feet (11 m) in the short-span area. The trusses connected to the perimeter at alternate columns, and were therefore on 6.8-foot (2.1 m) centers. The top chords of the trusses were bolted to seats welded to the spandrels on the exterior side and a channel welded to interior box columns on the interior side. The floors were connected to the perimeter spandrel plates with viscoelastic dampers, which helped reduce the amount of sway felt by building occupants.
The towers also incorporated a "hat truss" or "outrigger truss" located between the 107th and 110th floors, which consisted of six trusses along the long axis of core and four along the short axis. This truss system allowed optimized load redistribution of floor diaphragms between the perimeter and core, with improved performance between the different materials of flexible steel and rigid concrete allowing the moment frames to transfer sway into compression on the core, which also mostly supported the transmission tower.
Read more about this topic: Collapse Of The World Trade Center
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