Scientists find Active thermite residue in WTC dust

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I personally like the "ray gun turned the concrete into dust" theory.

http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=5714

Evidence of advanced fusion devices at the WTC

The Writings of a Finnish Military Expert on 9/11

1. Pulverization of 99% of concrete into ultra fine dust as recorded by official studies. Concrete dust was created instantly throughout the towers when the fusion device million degree heat rapidly expanded water vapour 1000-fold in the concrete floors.

2. Superheated steels ablating (vaporizing continuously as they fall) as seen in video clips of the towers collapsing. This requires uniform temperatures roughly twice that of thermite. Conventional demolition or explosive charges (thermate, rdx, hdx etc.) cannot transfer heath so rapidly that the steel goes above it's boiling temperature.

3. 22 ton outer wall steel sections ejected 200 meters into the winter garden. Cutting charges cannot eject heavy steels and throwing charges cannot provide the energy required without heavy, solid surface mounts.

4. 330 ton section of outer wall columns ripping off side of tower. Cutting charges cannot eject heavy steels linked together and throwing charges cannot provide the energy required without very heavy, solid surfaces to mount those charges.

5. Molten ponds of steel at the bottom of elevator shafts (WTC1, WTC2, WTC7). Massive heath loads have been present at the lower parts of these high-rise buildings. As one of the witnesses after seeing the flow of metals declared: "no one will be found alive".

6. The spire behaviour (stands for 20-30 seconds, evaporates and goes down, steel dust remains in the air where the spire was). The spire did not stand because it lost its durability when the joints vaporized.

7. Sharp spikes in seismograph readings (Richter 2.1 and 2.3) occurred at the beginning of collapse for both towers. Short duration and high power indicate an explosive event.

8. A press weighting 50 tons disappeared from a basement floor of Twin Towers and was never recovered from debris. Not possible with collapses or controlled demolitions. The press was vaporized or melted totally.

9. Bone dust cloud around the WTC. This was found not until spring 2006 from the Deutsche Bank building. (In excess of 700 human remains found on the roof and from air vents). See www.911citizenswatch.org/print.php?sid=906

10. Fires took 100 days to extinguish despite continuous spraying of water. Thermate would burn out totally and then cool down much faster, just in a few days. This long cooling time means the total heath load being absorbed into the steels of the WTC was massive, far in excess anything found in collapses or typical controlled demolitions.

11. Brown shades of color in the air due nuclear radiation forming NO2, NO3 and nitric acid. TV and documentary footage changed the color balance to blue to disguise this fact indicating complicity in the coverup.

12. Elevated Tritium values measured in the WTC area but not elsewhere in New York. Official studies stated that 8 EXIT signs from two commercial Boeing jets were responsible. The tritium in those EXIT signs is insufficient to explain the measurements (very little tritium is available for measuring after evaporation into air as hydrogen and as tritiated water vapour. This can provide conclusive proof of fusion devices and therefore US/Israeli military involvement.

13. Pyroclastic flow observed in the concrete-based clouds. Only found with volcanic eruptions and nuclear detonations. The explosion squibs cool down just a few milliseconds after the explosion or after having reached some 10 meters in the air. Pyroclastic flow will not mix with other clouds meaning very serious heath in those clouds not possible with the conventional demolition or explosive charges. The pyroclastic clouds were cooling down at the WTC but this process took some 30 seconds. See [video=google;1381525012075538113]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1381525012075538113[/video]

14. Huge expanding dust clouds 5 times the volume of the building indicating extreme levels of heat generated far in excess of traditional demolition explosives.

15. Rubble height was some 10% of the original instead of 33% expected in a traditional demolition. Fusion device removal of underground central steel framework allowed upper framework to fall into this empty space and reduce the rubble height.

16. No survivors found, except some firefighters in one corner pocket in the rubble who looked up to see blue sky above them instead of being crushed by collapsing debris. Upward fusion flashlight-like beam of destruction missed this pocket but removed debris above those lucky firemen.

17. 14 rescue dogs and some rescue workers died far too soon afterward to be attributed to asbestos or dust toxins (respiratory problems due to alpha and tritium particles created by fusion are far more toxic)

18. Record concentrations of near-atomic size metal particles found in dust studies due to ablated steel. Only possible with vaporized (boiling) steels.

19. Decontamination procedure used at Ground Zero (hi-pressure water spraying) for all steel removed from site. Water spraying contains fusion radioactivity.

20. No bodies, furniture or computers found in the rubble, but intact sheets of paper covered the streets with fine dust. Items with significant mass absorbed fusion energy (neutrons, x-rays) and were vaporized while paper did not. Paper and powder theory.

21. 200 000 gallon sprinkler water tanks on the roofs of WTC1 and WTC2, but no water in the ruins. Heat of fusion devices vaporized large reservoirs of water.

22. Reports of cars exploding around the WTC and many burned out wrecks could be seen that had not been hit by debris. Fusion energy (heath radiation and the neutrons) caused cars to ignite and burn far from WTC site.

23. Wide area electrical outage, repairs took over 3 months. Fusion devices cause EM pulse with Compton scattering. See German engineers help the USA plate 5.

24. EM pulse was recorded by broadcast cameras with high quality electronic circuitry. This occurred at the same time as the seismic peaks recorded by Lamont Doherty during the beginning of the collapse. This is due to the Compton Effect and resulted in a large area power outage at the WTC.
Source: www.saunalahti.fi/wtc2001/evidence.htm
 
you didn't answer my question before but i'll try again. case closed? on what? how do these "findings" close the case in your favor?

I tried to answer your question before, but the mods deleted my post. But your seriously asking me how the presence of a thermite like substance proves the buildings were demolished? I don't know. Maybe because I don't think the odds that someone secretly rigged the building for demolition, then the hijackers coincidently decided to ram the planes into the buildings before they could set off the charges is very likely.

In fact, it's simply impossible for the buildings to have collapsed in that manner without demolitions. There's just no way. The cores of the buildings were massive, and there was no weight bearing down on them that could have possible crushed them. But as you can see by videos of the collapse, and as NIST observed, there was core failure preceded the collapse.
 
Yes, sorry, I should have said concrete-containing buildings.



And how do you know that? Did you examine each floor before it hit the ground?



Yes, if the upper floors had been turned to dust instead of falling, they wouldn't have fallen. However, there are numerous videotapes which show the upper floors falling, so I have to conclude that they weren't just turned to dust.

barfo

Just look at photos of ground zero and listen to the accounts of those who were at the scene, the wreckage was basically mangled steel and dust. Again, there were large quantities of concrete dust that got scattered all over the area.

Just look at the massive, thick clouds of dust from the concrete and other debris. http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/evidence/photos/wtc2exp2.html You can see that most of it was pulverized before it hit the ground.

As it progressed, there was less and less material over the "collapse zone". Just watch videos of the collapses over and over, and you'll see what I mean. If it was a gravity based collapse, what was pushing down on it? It exploded from the top down.

To believe the official story is to believe that an airborne cloud of dust can push down straight through 80 stories of undamaged skyscraper, perfectly symmetrical and at near free fall speed.

Also, watch building 7 collapse and tell me that could have happened because of a fire.
 
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More photos of the towers pulverization:

http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/evidence/photos/wtcdust3.html
http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/evidence/photos/wtc1dust2.html


I'm not sure what you're trying to prove by proposing that the concrete broke up in mid air, then fell through the rest of the building, destroying it along the way, then turned to dust only after landing on the ground.....but that's really a silly suggestion.

Here's a video showing why the pancake theory was impossible
[video=youtube;bdQh18kvpRU]
 
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Just look at photos of ground zero and listen to the accounts of those who were at the scene, the wreckage was basically mangled steel and dust. Again, there were large quantities of concrete dust that got scattered all over the area.

Of course there was. Nobody disputes that.

Just look at the massive, thick clouds of dust from the concrete and other debris. http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/evidence/photos/wtc2exp2.html You can see that most of it was pulverized before it hit the ground.

No I can't. I can see a building, and a big cloud of dust, but I am unable to determine by inspecting a photograph how much of the building was turned to dust and how much remained as larger chunks. Except that I can rule out 0% and 100%, since I can see both dust and larger objects in the photo.

As it progressed, there was less and less material over the "collapse zone". Just watch videos of the collapses over and over, and you'll see what I mean. If it was a gravity based collapse, what was pushing down on it? It exploded from the top down.

To believe the official story is to believe that an airborne cloud of dust can push down straight through 60 stories of undamaged skyscraper, perfectly symmetrical and at near free fall speed.

No, to believe the official story is to understand that the building didn't in fact vaporize in midair.

Also, watch building 7 collapse and tell me that could have happened because of a fire.

It could have happened because of a fire. But I'm not a structural engineer. If a majority of structural engineers claim it is impossible, I'd be inclined to believe them. But as far as I know that isn't the consensus.

barfo
 

Those are very pretty pictures. What are they suppose to show me? There was a big dust cloud? That's not news.

I'm not sure what you're trying to prove by proposing that the concrete broke up in mid air, then fell through the rest of the building, destroying it along the way, then turned to dust only after landing on the ground.....but that's really a silly suggestion.

Never dropped anything on the ground, have you? Get a chunk of concrete, go up on the roof, and drop it. Notice what happens when it hits the ground.

It should be obvious that if you knock down a building, chunks of it will smash on the ground. The idea that none of it reaches the ground is so completely absurd I can't believe you are arguing for it.

barfo
 
I want everyone to take a moment and watch this video as it is the most compelling evidence yet that our security was unbreakable. Indeed we had the terrorists beaten and within our grip and we simply fell out the window. With Frank Drebin as part of our security forces I won't accept that we could have been defeated so easily.

[video=youtube;1LOTovO7oqM]


P.S. Joking aside I don't know what happened but I think it bears serious investigation with officials under oath. Perhaps there was a rush to judgment that was realized after event spiraled out of control (post Iraq invasion) and it would have been politically inconvenient to admit such a massive error. That is but one of many reasons that bush and cheney might have wanted to not be under oath. I certainly don't understand why they wouldn't have agreed to be under oath if they didn't have something to hide. That something might not have been collusion but rather that they realized they hadn't investigated thoroughly before deciding it was Bin Laden. Just out of curiosity why do the Debunker group think that Cheney was so adamant no cameras, no recording devices, not under oath and he and Bush must be interviewed at the same time? I'm curious to hear! I don't know what happened but it bears investigation.
 
Here's a video showing why the pancake theory was impossible


Thanks, that was fabulous! The voice-over is hilarious.

Completely unconvincing, but very entertaining.

barfo
 
Those are very pretty pictures. What are they suppose to show me? There was a big dust cloud? That's not news.



Never dropped anything on the ground, have you? Get a chunk of concrete, go up on the roof, and drop it. Notice what happens when it hits the ground.

It should be obvious that if you knock down a building, chunks of it will smash on the ground. The idea that none of it reaches the ground is so completely absurd I can't believe you are arguing for it.

barfo

Go to your back yard, build a 15 foot tall rectangular cage, with 1 inch steel bars placed ever 4 inches. Then build an interconnected steel core with 15 thick 3 inch bars steel bars like the one in the picture. Connected your two steel structures with more lightweight steel, and pour concrete floors on to each. Then damage the floors and set a fire, and see if the whole damn thing crashes down on itself at free fall speed, shredding your steel core.

I know you won't actually do this, but just imagine what the official story is saying. That fires took down 3 skyscrapers for the first time in history.

Here's Jesse Ventura, tellingit like it is! :pimp:

[video=youtube;-AxYO21wE38]
 
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I know you won't actually do this, but just imagine what the official story is saying. That fires took down 3 skyscrapers for the first time in history.

How many times in history have airliners crashed into 110 story buildings?

barfo
 
How many times in history have airliners crashed into 110 story buildings?

barfo

...are there any mechanical engineers on this board?!?!?! I am certain that the WTC buildings were constructed to withstand much more than a couple of measily little airplanes crashing into them and catching a few of their floors on fire :dunno:
 
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...are there any mechanical engineers on this board?!?!?! I am certain that the WTC buildings were constructed to withstand much more than a couple of measily little airplanes crashing into them and catching a few of their floors on fire :dunno:

They probably would have withstood one or the other. You had seriously damaged buildings hit by fully fueled passenger jets and then a long burning fire.
 
How many times in history have airliners crashed into 110 story buildings?

barfo

A plane actually did strike the Empire state building before...look it up. But do whatever you want to the structure. My point is, even if you started a massive fire, cut the entire top part COMPLETLY off, then dropped it from free fall 50 feet into the air, it STILL would not have crashed through the entire building as we saw on 9-11.

According to the "official reports" the primary cause of the collapse was actually the fires. As you can see, after the planes hit, the buildings the impact damage had already been done and the buildings were still standing. It was the ensuing FIRES that they say caused these massive columns to fail? Excuse me? There wasn't even any fuel in the cores to begin with, and the fire spread around the rooms, burning all of it's fuel rapidly, so by the time the buildings collapsed, the fires appeared to actually be less intense. The NIST's story, in a nutshell, is that a combination of the jet crash and the fires caused a floor to collapse,which then went on to cause the entire BUILDING to explode. But the never explain the 2nd part, and they present poor evidence for the 1st.
 
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Sorry, making things up doesn't work.

The dust that was analyzed was the air born dust that scattered around for hundreds of yards. It was the dust that was airborn and expelled during the collapse.
Exactly what am I making up? So hundreds of tons of concrete being pulverized as it hits the ground isn't going to scatter as airborne dust? Seriously, are you pulling my leg?
 
Each floor of the WTC was had about an acre of 4 inch think concrete, all of it pulverized in mid-air. The building materials, which would have made up the majority of the weight were pulverized into fine dust, and went air born. Thus, their weight could not have contributed to the progressive collapse.
So you're saying that about an acre of 4-inch thick concrete pulverizes on impact after falling from 12 feet? Are you Allen Funt?
 
So you're saying that about an acre of 4-inch thick concrete pulverizes on impact after falling from 12 feet? Are you Allen Funt?

No, actually I don't believe that is very likely at all. That is actually one of the arguments in favor of the notion that there were explosives in the building. But as I said, there was pulverized concrete dust all over Manhattan.
An enourmous quantity of dust was in the air before the towers hit the ground.

Do you think that if you dropped a 100 pound chunk of concrete from the top of the tower, that it would have pulverized into dust? I'm sure that some dust would have been created, but I'd expect to see it in many pieces..perhaps measured in inches.
 
No, actually I don't believe that is very likely at all. That is actually one of the arguments in favor of the notion that there were explosives in the building. But as I said, there was pulverized concrete dust all over Manhattan.
An enourmous quantity of dust was in the air before the towers hit the ground.

Do you think that if you dropped a 100 pound chunk of concrete from the top of the tower, that it would have pulverized into dust? I'm sure that some dust would have been created, but I'd expect to see it in many pieces..perhaps measured in inches.
There was one hell of a lot more dust in the air once the towers hit the ground.

We're talking hundreds and thousands of tons of concrete collapsing in on itself, I don't see the relevance of how I think a 100 pound chunk would react to free falling from that height. But to answer your question, I'd be surprised if even a fourth of that 100 pounds was left in measurable chunks after dropping from that height.
 
...are there any mechanical engineers on this board?!?!?! I am certain that the WTC buildings were constructed to withstand much more than a couple of measily little airplanes crashing into them and catching a few of their floors on fire :dunno:

This comment actually adresses a sad fact. When the WTC was constructed, they were built to withstand the impact of a Boeing 707. The reason it's sad, is that those calculations didn't include the impact of a fully fueled plane and the damage from fire. It was only the damage from the impact of the plane.
 
A plane actually did strike the Empire state building before...look it up.

That plane was a prop plane that weighed a few thousand pounds. The planes that struck the WTC were approximately 250,000 lbs and 450,000 lbs. Furthermore, the buildings were constructed differently. The Empire State building was built without the use of computer modeling or decades of skyscraper design. In other words, it was massively overengineered as in an incredibly stiff building. It has a steel superstructure covered in concrete with a curtainwall of concrete and stone. The WTC was a much lighter structure, more able to flex. It was built primarily of steel with a curtainwall primarily of glass.

That being said, fly a Boeing 757 or 767 into the Empire State building and it comes down too, although not as elegantly as the WTC, which means a much greater loss of life..
 
This comment actually adresses a sad fact. When the WTC was constructed, they were built to withstand the impact of a Boeing 707. The reason it's sad, is that those calculations didn't include the impact of a fully fueled plane and the damage from fire. It was only the damage from the impact of the plane.

...how hot of a fire do you think that the steel construction was engineered for??? :dunno:
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/03/n...07&en=a2c62eb2b42cf30c&ex=1385874000&adxnnl=1

December 3, 2003
New Evidence Is Reported That Floors Failed on 9/11
By JAMES GLANZ

GAITHERSBURG, Md., Dec. 2 ? Federal investigators said here Tuesday that new evidence supported earlier suggestions that the floor supports in the World Trade Center began failing in the minutes before the towers fell and might have played a major role in their collapse.

The investigators, who are carrying out a two-year, $16 million analysis of the collapses, made it clear that they had not yet settled on a final explanation. They said, though, that their findings gave new weight to a theory that the failure of the floors weakened the towers' internal structure to the point that the entire buildings came down.

S. Shyam Sunder, who is leading the investigation for the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the Commerce Department, said, "We are seeing evidence of floors appearing to be sagging ? or that had been damaged ? prior to collapse." Still, Dr. Sunder said, "The relative role of the floors and the columns still remain to be determined in the collapse."

According to an alternative theory of the collapse, the planes that smashed into the towers damaged the towers' vertical structural columns so severely that the buildings were virtually certain to fall. In that view, none of the buildings' many structural novelties ? the towers were daring engineering innovations in their day ? would have played a significant role in the collapses.

Last spring, the standards institute found the first photographic evidence on the east face of the south tower that a single floor ? with its lightweight support system, called a truss ? had sagged in the minutes before it started collapsing. Now, detailed analysis of photos and videos has revealed at least three more sagging floors on that face, said William Pitts, a researcher at the institute's Building and Fire Research Laboratory.

In addition, Dr. Pitts said, sudden expansions of the fires across whole floors in each tower shortly before they fell suggested internal collapses ? burning floors above suddenly giving way and spreading the blaze below.

Finally, an unexplained cascade of molten metal from the northeast corner of the south tower just before it collapsed might have started when a floor carrying pieces of one of the jetliners began to sag and fail. The metal was probably molten aluminum from the plane and could have come through the top of an 80th floor window as the floor above gave way, Dr. Pitts said.

"That's probably why it poured out ? simply because it was dumped there," Dr. Pitts said. "The structural people really need to look at this carefully."

The investigators also said that newly disclosed Port Authority documents suggested that the towers were designed to withstand the kind of airplane strike that they suffered on Sept. 11.

Earlier statements by Port Authority officials and outside engineers involved in designing the buildings suggested that the designers considered an accidental crash only by slower aircraft, moving at less than 200 miles per hour. The newly disclosed documents, from the 1960's, show that the Port Authority considered aircraft moving at 600 m.p.h., slightly faster and therefore more destructive than the ones that did hit the towers, Dr. Sunder said.

The towers did withstand the plane strikes at first, allowing thousands of people to escape, but then the fires, stoked by burning jet fuel, softened the steel of the towers. Potentially challenging other statements by Port Authority engineers, Dr. Sunder said it was now uncertain whether the authority fully considered the fuel and its effects when it studied the towers' safety during the design phase.

"Whether the fuel was taken into account or not is an open question," Dr. Sunder said. It is also unclear, he said, "whether the extent of the loss of human life as a result of that" was taken into account.

The studies of the floor trusses and the design of the towers are just two elements of the investigation, which is carrying out computer calculations of the collapses, rebuilding pieces of the towers in order to test them in real fires, and piecing together a highly detailed chronology of the response to the attack.

In one set of laboratory tests concerning the floor trusses, researchers used earthquake simulators to violently shake assemblages much like the ceilings in the twin towers. The shaking was meant to simulate the impact of the aircraft.

The findings, said Richard Gann, a senior research scientist at the Building and Fire Research Laboratory, showed that many of the fire-protecting ceiling tiles near the impact probably crumbled, exposing the undersides of the trusses directly to the fires.
 
...how hot of a fire do you think that the steel construction was engineered for??? :dunno:

That's also an issue. Much of the fireproofing that was put on the steel was blown off the steel by the impact of the planes. Left without that protective coating, steel weakens at a temperature consistent with the fires that took place in the buildings.
 
That's also an issue. Much of the fireproofing that was put on the steel was blown off the steel by the impact of the planes. Left without that protective coating, steel weakens at a temperature consistent with the fires that took place in the buildings.

...and, at what temperature does steel "weaken" and/or "melt"??? Did both WTC fires burn this hot??? Really??? How did they do that??? :dunno:
 
Steel at room temperature: 100% Strength

Steel at -50F: 111% Strength

Steel at 500F: 91% Strength

Steel at 900F: 76% Strength

Steel at 1100F: 69% Strength

Steel at 1350F: 44% Strength

Steel at >1700F: <10% Strength.

See a correlation Here??

Ever seen a black smith pounding out steel at 850 degrees? Why does this work?

The confined temperature in the WTC was about 1100 to 1500F.

All it takes is one failure to get a floor falling and nothing will stop it. The momentum is more than the building was built to withstand in perfect order. Drop thirty storeys of a building from 10 feet and see what happens to anything around it or under it.
 
Steel at room temperature: 100% Strength

Steel at -50F: 111% Strength

Steel at 500F: 91% Strength

Steel at 900F: 76% Strength

Steel at 1100F: 69% Strength

Steel at 1350F: 44% Strength

Steel at >1700F: <10% Strength.

See a correlation Here??

Ever seen a black smith pounding out steel at 850 degrees? Why does this work?

The confined temperature in the WTC was about 1100 to 1500F.

All it takes is one failure to get a floor falling and nothing will stop it. The momentum is more than the building was built to withstand in perfect order. Drop thirty storeys of a building from 10 feet and see what happens to anything around it or under it.

...this is what I was looking for. Thanks DC! :pimp:
 
Earlier statements by Port Authority officials and outside engineers involved in designing the buildings suggested that the designers considered an accidental crash only by slower aircraft, moving at less than 200 miles per hour. The newly disclosed documents, from the 1960's, show that the Port Authority considered aircraft moving at 600 m.p.h., slightly faster and therefore more destructive than the ones that did hit the towers, Dr. Sunder said.

I just wanted to talk a bit about this part. Kinetic energy (the energy an object possesses due solely to its motion, or alternatively the amount of work required to accelerate a given mass--or the work distributed in an objects deceleration) is defined by the equation: KE = 1/2 * (mass) * (velocity)^2.

So the difference between the firewall speed reported by the second plane (~586 mph) and the 600mph is 14mph, or about 6 m/s, and therefore a 4% difference in the calculation. And the Port Authority guess of a 707 (weight ~220,000#) is about half that of a 767-233ER (385,000#). So the work done by the deceleration of the 9/11 flights from 600mph to zero (absorbed almost entirely by the building) was about twice more than the building was designed for by the PA. And that's just the kinetic energy from the airplane. For the calculation, it comes out to about 14 billion joules--or about 3 tons of TNT.

Then you factor in the ~12000 gallons of fuel onboard. Contrary to popular (uninformed?) opinion, since the fuel didn't mix at a high ratio with air before it started burning, there wasn't a large explosion like you see on CHiPs reruns. If there had been an explosion of high-pressure supersonic gases, there would've been a large sonic boom that shattered concrete, and not the long, loud roar consistent with subsonic deflagration. (There were "small" explosions, that occurred most likely when the fire reached a large column of air, like an elevator shaft or something). Since they weren't supersonic gases, they didn't have an expanding shock wave that went through load-bearing supports, but instead passed around the support columns.

The WTC columns were covered with insulation that was designed to maintain their strength for about 2-3 hours of ordinary fire. But it wasn't just office paper and desks that were the cause of the fire--it was aviation fuel. The rate of burning was limited not by lack of fuel, but lack of oxygen in confined spaces. Lower oxygen content means a longer, slower burn. The heat had more time to penetrate the insulation. A little like cooking your steak: if you sear it quickly you'll get crust on the edges and stay almost raw in the center, even at very high temperatures. But if you have it on a long, slow cook, you'll penetrate through the meat and raise the temperature of the inside. In the case of the WTC, the "inside" was the structural steel. And as steel gets hotter, it gets weaker both in tensile strength and modulus of elasticity. (Can't hold up as much, and bends more, causing more weakness) Read this chapter of the "Structure Steel Handbook" by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, page 1.17ff. Then compare it to the Popular Mechanics report debunking many of these conspiracy theories, including the "can't melt steel with gas" one.
Jet fuel burns at 800° to 1500°F, not hot enough to melt steel (2750°F). However, experts agree that for the towers to collapse, their steel frames didn't need to melt, they just had to lose some of their structural strength — and that required exposure to much less heat. "I have never seen melted steel in a building fire," says retired New York deputy fire chief Vincent Dunn, author of The Collapse Of Burning Buildings: A Guide To Fireground Safety. "But I've seen a lot of twisted, warped, bent and sagging steel. What happens is that the steel tries to expand at both ends, but when it can no longer expand, it sags and the surrounding concrete cracks."
"Steel loses about 50 percent of its strength at 1100°F," (ed.--you can corroborate this with the graph above) notes senior engineer Farid Alfawak-hiri of the American Institute of Steel Construction. "And at 1800° it is probably at less than 10 percent." NIST also believes that a great deal of the spray-on fireproofing insulation was likely knocked off the steel beams that were in the path of the crashing jets, leaving the metal more vulnerable to the heat.
But jet fuel wasn't the only thing burning, notes Forman Williams, a professor of engineering at the University of California, San Diego, and one of seven structural engineers and fire experts that PM consulted. He says that while the jet fuel was the catalyst for the WTC fires, the resulting inferno was intensified by the combustible material inside the buildings, including rugs, curtains, furniture and paper. NIST reports that pockets of fire hit 1832°F.
"The jet fuel was the ignition source," Williams tells PM. "It burned for maybe 10 minutes, and [the towers] were still standing in 10 minutes. It was the rest of the stuff burning afterward that was responsible for the heat transfer that eventually brought them down."
I find it extremely difficult to bend the laws of physics to invent a conspiracy here. The Occam's Razor approach would say that a 100-ton airplane carrying around 12000 gallons of jet fuel would, upon crashing into a high-rise with twice the energy the building was designed for, and igniting hotter fires than expected or designed for, weakening the structural steel to a point where even the engineered design factors put in for safety weren't enough to support the load of 20-40 floors of concrete and steel---it would say that "duh, the building came down b/c 40 floors of concrete and steel, no longer being held up, accelerated toward the ground pretty quickly due to gravitational force. The mass of 40 floors impacting a floor beneath it at the acceleration of gravity would therefore cause a dynamic force to be imparted to the lower floor much much higher than it was designed for, and it would then collapse, starting a chain reaction. You don't have to be a rocket scientist or nuclear physicist to understand it, I hope--but fortunately I am both and hopefully can help.
 
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You don't have to be a rocket scientist or nuclear physicist to understand it, I hope--but fortunately I am both and hopefully can help.

Hahaha.

Nice!

Ed O.
 
I just wanted to talk a bit about this part. Kinetic energy (the energy an object possesses due solely to its motion, or alternatively the amount of work required to accelerate a given mass--or the work distributed in an objects deceleration) is defined by the equation: KE = 1/2 * (mass) * (velocity)^2.

So the difference between the firewall speed reported by the second plane (~586 mph) and the 600mph is 14mph, or about 6 m/s, and therefore a 4% difference in the calculation. And the Port Authority guess of a 707 (weight ~220,000#) is about half that of a 767-233ER (385,000#). So the work done by the deceleration of the 9/11 flights from 600mph to zero (absorbed almost entirely by the building) was about twice more than the building was designed for by the PA. And that's just the kinetic energy from the airplane. For the calculation, it comes out to about 14 billion joules--or about 3 tons of TNT.

Then you factor in the ~12000 gallons of fuel onboard. Contrary to popular (uninformed?) opinion, since the fuel didn't mix at a high ratio with air before it started burning, there wasn't a large explosion like you see on CHiPs reruns. If there had been an explosion of high-pressure supersonic gases, there would've been a large sonic boom that shattered concrete, and not the long, loud roar consistent with subsonic deflagration. (There were "small" explosions, that occurred most likely when the fire reached a large column of air, like an elevator shaft or something). Since they weren't supersonic gases, they didn't have an expanding shock wave that went through load-bearing supports, but instead passed around the support columns.

The WTC columns were covered with insulation that was designed to maintain their strength for about 2-3 hours of ordinary fire. But it wasn't just office paper and desks that were the cause of the fire--it was aviation fuel. The rate of burning was limited not by lack of fuel, but lack of oxygen in confined spaces. Lower oxygen content means a longer, slower burn. The heat had more time to penetrate the insulation. A little like cooking your steak: if you sear it quickly you'll get crust on the edges and stay almost raw in the center, even at very high temperatures. But if you have it on a long, slow cook, you'll penetrate through the meat and raise the temperature of the inside. In the case of the WTC, the "inside" was the structural steel. And as steel gets hotter, it gets weaker both in tensile strength and modulus of elasticity. (Can't hold up as much, and bends more, causing more weakness) Read this chapter of the "Structure Steel Handbook" by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, page 1.17ff. Then compare it to the Popular Mechanics report debunking many of these conspiracy theories, including the "can't melt steel with gas" one.
I find it extremely difficult to bend the laws of physics to invent a conspiracy here. The Occam's Razor approach would say that a 100-ton airplane carrying around 12000 gallons of jet fuel would, upon crashing into a high-rise with twice the energy the building was designed for, and igniting hotter fires than expected or designed for, weakening the structural steel to a point where even the engineered design factors put in for safety weren't enough to support the load of 20-40 floors of concrete and steel---it would say that "duh, the building came down b/c 40 floors of concrete and steel, no longer being held up, accelerated toward the ground pretty quickly due to gravitational force. The mass of 40 floors impacting a floor beneath it at the acceleration of gravity would therefore cause a dynamic force to be imparted to the lower floor much much higher than it was designed for, and it would then collapse, starting a chain reaction. You don't have to be a rocket scientist or nuclear physicist to understand it, I hope--but fortunately I am both and hopefully can help.

...you most definitely helped, thanks to you too Brian!!! :clap:
 
The article said the investigation cost $16M over two years. Just what does that buy? Let's look at 1 year and half that amount.

$8M buys...

$40K/month office space = ~$500K (includes electricity, phone, insurance, etc.)

35 top engineers and scientists @ $200K/year each = $3.5M

40 "workers" @ $50K = $2M

Leaves $2M to rent electron microscopes, farm out studies, etc.
 

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