Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - Unanswered Questions Surrounding Terrorist Attacks

Ustwo · 05-03-2006, 12:32 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by The_Jazz

Will, I'm enjoying this thread so far, and I hope that we can keep the discussion limited to accepted facts and observed results of the attack. But that's me, and obviously host and Ustwo disagree with me, which is fine.

Other than to blow sunshine up your ass, my point is to ask what you think of my previous post of a plausible explanation for the higher temperature that would occur. It seems pretty clear to me that the fire could have easily burned hotter than the 210 C ingition point of the jet fuel given I can set a house on fire using the same mix of jet fuel and achieve 1100 F ON AVERAGE. Since steel loses riditity at the same 1100 degrees, we'd clearly need a higher temperature than produced in an average house fire to reach the critical point in 47 minutes, but I don't see where that's an unacheiveable task given that there were fire resistant materials known to be burning at the time. Given the collapse of the structure, all that was needed was for the focal point of the fire to be in a critical area.

Quote:

"Melted" Steel
CLAIM: "We have been lied to," announces the Web site AttackOnAmerica.net. "The first lie was that the load of fuel from the aircraft was the cause of structural failure. No kerosene fire can burn hot enough to melt steel." The posting is entitled "Proof Of Controlled Demolition At The WTC."

FACT: 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," 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."

Its in my link above. Guess I wasn't done, but this makes me quite angry.