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Originally Posted by willravel
The source of the heat was the fire, not the beams. In order for the beams to be 1,500F, the fire needs to be at least that hot consistently enough for the heat to be transfered across the system of steel beams.
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correct, but I don’t think the beam reached 1500C, from what I’ve read it was about half as hot as that.
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Originally Posted by willravel
Have you ever opened your stove at 500F? It's really hot.
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Darn tooting it’s hot.
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Originally Posted by willravel
So hot that one would have difficulty breathing if one stuck his head too close to the open stove.
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The difficulty experienced with breathing is due to the differences in temperature of the air in your lung and the air out side, if you’ve ever worked with a kiln, you will realize that when you are around that much heat for a while, its not to much harder to breath, nothing compared to the initial trouble.
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Originally Posted by willravel
Imagine that stove was 100,000 square feet, was over 3 times as hot as that 500F stove, and the only real opening was a hole about the size of a plane and was pretty far from any entrance/exit.
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The center of the oven would be that hot, not the sides, you probably know that ovens don’t all heat evenly, if you place 2 baking pans in with cookies, you need to rotate them half way through for them to cook properly. The source of heat was the fire, and it heated everything at the center, the air is easy to heat, and does not reduce the amount of heat the fire is generating much, the steel beams how ever do absorbed much more, the air is cycling through, so it never gets really hot before it cycles out of the building, maybe 300F at most by the time its leaving, and not more than 150F at the edges of the building.
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Originally Posted by willravel
1) the heat inside the building would make it impossible for a human to make it from the stairs or the elevator to the opening and
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no, temperature is different from heat, the air may be 500F degrees, but, there is little heat in hot air, because it has very little mass (and other molecular things that are to complex to get into) bottom line, the amount of energy in hot air is little, it takes a lot of it to heat an object, it will be very uncomfortable, but not impossible. also air is a poor conductor of heat, meaning that it does not transfer heat well, this is why you can move your hand over a candle, it has a high temperature, but does not transfer it well, and if you leave your hand over a candle you will burn your self, but if you move it slowly over, the amount of energy does not build fast enough in your hand to raise its temperature high enough to burn you.
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Originally Posted by willravel
2) most of the heat and exhaust from the flames would be pouring out of the opening?
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it really depends on the lay out of the floor, if there was a clear path from the outside to the fire and back out, and the wind was blowing that direction, then yes, but if there was not a clear path, the fire would burn inside and not be blown out by the wind. From the videos I have seen, the wind was blowing strong, but there was no easy path over the fire, that is why the smoke was just billowing out the sides, and not rushing out. Most of the heat was staying at the center, not flowing out, only the air was moving the heat out, and air does not carry much heat at all. As is evident by the people wearing jackets on the out side, it was cold or not very warm by the time it got to them.