A High-Quality High-Fidelity Visualization Of The September 11 Attack On The World Trade Center

In this application paper we describe the efforts of a multi-disciplinary team towards producing a visualization of the September 11 Attack on the North Tower of New York’s World Trade Center. The visualization was designed to meet two requirements. First, the visualization had to depict the impact with high fidelity, by closely following the laws of physics. Second, the visualization had to be eloquent to a non-expert user. This was achieved by first designing and computing a finite element analysis (FEA) simulation of the impact between the aircraft and the top 20 stories of the building, and then by visualizing the FEA results with a state-of-the-art commercial animation system. The visualization was enabled by an automatic translator that converts the simulation data into an animation system 3D scene. We built upon a previously developed translator. The translator was substantially extended to enable and control visualization of fire and of disintegrating elements, to better scale with the number of nodes and number of states, to handle beam elements with complex profiles, and to handle smoothed particle hydrodynamics liquid representation. The resulting translator is a powerful automatic and scalable tool for high-quality visualization of FEA results.

Paul Rosen, Voicu Popescu, Christoph Hoffmann, and Ayhan Irfanoglu. A High-Quality High-Fidelity Visualization Of The September 11 Attack On The World Trade Center. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG), 2008.

@article{rosen2008high,
  title = {A High-Quality High-Fidelity Visualization of the September 11 Attack on the
    World Trade Center},
  author = {Rosen, Paul and Popescu, Voicu and Hoffmann, Christoph and Irfanoglu, Ayhan},
  journal = {IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG)},
  volume = {14},
  pages = {937--947},
  year = {2008},
  abstract = {In this application paper we describe the efforts of a multi-disciplinary
    team towards producing a visualization of the September 11 Attack on the North Tower of
    New York's World Trade Center. The visualization was designed to meet two requirements.
    First, the visualization had to depict the impact with high fidelity, by closely
    following the laws of physics. Second, the visualization had to be eloquent to a
    non-expert user. This was achieved by first designing and computing a finite element
    analysis (FEA) simulation of the impact between the aircraft and the top 20 stories of
    the building, and then by visualizing the FEA results with a state-of-the-art commercial
    animation system. The visualization was enabled by an automatic translator that converts
    the simulation data into an animation system 3D scene. We built upon a previously
    developed translator. The translator was substantially extended to enable and control
    visualization of fire and of disintegrating elements, to better scale with the number of
    nodes and number of states, to handle beam elements with complex profiles, and to handle
    smoothed particle hydrodynamics liquid representation. The resulting translator is a
    powerful automatic and scalable tool for high-quality visualization of FEA results.}
}