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Building Explosion Simulator (2D)

A gravity- and momentum-driven progressive collapse model: cut the charge floor's columns and watch the upper block crush every storey below it in an inelastic cascade, with a live free-fall time comparison.

Explosions & Blast Physics2DModerate60 FPS📱 Mobile-adapted⇄ 3D version
2d-building-explosion-simulator ↗ Open standalone

The 3D version of this simulator orbits a rendered office tower and lets you place a charge on its facade; this 2D companion strips the scene away to focus on the mechanics that actually decide whether — and how fast — a demolition-triggered building comes down. Cutting a floor's columns does not, by itself, bring the rest of the structure down at blast speed: once support is removed, the mass above enters free fall and every storey it reaches afterwards is crushed by an inelastic collision that transfers momentum downward while draining kinetic energy into rubble. The simulator runs that cascade explicitly — floor mass, impact velocity and the growing falling mass are tracked frame by frame — so the live readout can show you something a video of a real demolition never labels: how close the observed collapse time comes to the theoretical free-fall time for the same drop height, the number engineers actually compare against footage to test progressive-collapse hypotheses.

⚙ Under the hood

A momentum-conserving progressive-collapse model: the mass above the charge floor free-falls under gravity (v += g·dt) until it reaches the next intact floor, where an inelastic collision (v' = v·m₁/(m₁+m₂)) merges that floor's mass into the falling block and compacts it into rubble, repeating storey by storey to grade. A parallel free-fall clock (t = √(2h/g)) lets you compare the simulated collapse time against the physical lower bound.

progressive collapsemomentum conservationinelastic collisionfree fallstructural failuredemolition physics

2D · HTML5 Canvas 2D · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install

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