Wednesday, October 19, 2011

9-11 and Jet Fuel

xkcd


(Comments are closed.)

15 comments:

  1. Actually, someone does know that temp. And if it's not 1500+ degrees C, it won't melt steel-reinforced columns.

    Or at least that's what thousands of physicists, engineers, architects have attested.

    See below:

    The Killer Fires Theory is Pure Fantasy

    The simple facts of temperatures:

    * 1535ºC (2795ºF) - melting point of iron
    * ~1510ºC (2750ºF) - melting point of typical structural steel
    * ~825ºC (1517ºF) - maximum temperature of hydrocarbon fires burning in the atmosphere without pressurization or pre-heating (premixed fuel and air - blue flame)

    Diffuse flames burn far cooler.
    Oxygen-starved diffuse flames are cooler yet.

    The fires in the towers were diffuse -- well below 800ºC.
    Their dark smoke showed they were oxygen-starved -- particularly in the South Tower.

    http://911research.wtc7.net/talks/towers/meltdownre.html

    . . . A Ludicrous Claim

    Skeptics of the official collapse theory were quick to point out that the claim that fires melted the steel is nonsensical. On October 21, 2001 J. McMichael wrote a now-classic article exposing many ludicrous claims by proponents of the gravity collapse theory, including the fire-melts-steel claim.
    e x c e r p t
    title: Muslims Suspend Laws of Physics!
    authors: J. McMichael
    I try not to think about that. I try not to think about a petroleum fire burning for 104 minutes, just getting hotter and hotter until it reached 1538 degrees Celsius (2800 Fahrenheit) and melted the steel

    http://911review.com/articles/jm/mslp_1.htm
    ...
    Whether the fuel burned gradually at a temperature below the boiling point of jet fuel (360 C), or burned rapidly above the boiling point of jet fuel, in neither case would an office building full of spilled jet fuel sustain a fire at 815 degrees C.
    page: 911review.com/articles/jm/mslp_1.htm

    Later, Eric Hufschmid appealed to people's experience with hydrocarbon-fueled fires, such as wood stoves and gas burners, to highlight the absurdity of the fire-melts-steel claim in the video Painful Deceptions.

    In a slide show first presented on September 11, 2003, Jim Hoffman noted the vast difference between the temperatures achievable by open flames and those required to melt steel.

    . . . No melted steel, no collapsed towers. For example, according to www.911research.wtc7.net, steel melts at a temperature of 2,777 degrees Fahrenheit, but jet fuel burns at only 1,517 degrees F. No melted steel, no collapsed towers.
    site: sciam.com

    ReplyDelete
  2. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  3. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  4. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  5. On Daily Kos promoting CTs (conspiracy theories) is a bannable offense.

    Just sayin'

    Oh, and any blacksmith can tell you that you don't need to melt iron or steel to "work" it (as in bending it, which is all that was needed to make the support trusses collapse out of their sockets). All you need to do is get it fairly hot (red—almost the lowest color temperature on the scale), much lower than 2700° F.

    LRod
    ZJX, ORD, ZAU retired

    ReplyDelete
  6. What LRod said.

    You don't melt metal to work it.

    But beyond that, Suzan, I am deleting all but your first comment. I won't permit my blog to be hijacked by anyone.

    If you want to write about this subject, please do it on your own blog.

    ReplyDelete
  7. You do not need red hot to soften mild steel. Much less heat will make the metal less than workable but far less strength than the structure requires.

    This whole thing was explained by the designer themselves.

    Eck!

    ReplyDelete
  8. Not to mention that until fairly recently (the past 50 years), the standard torch for welding steel was a... a... GASOLINE welding torch. Any blacksmith knows that you can make any fuel burn hotter by simply providing more oxygen to it, such as, say, a wind tunnel provided by the core of a skyscraper. Thus while gasoline theoretically burns at around 500C, you can indeed get it to burn at a much higher temperature by providing sufficient oxygen -- even to the point of melting steel (though as you point out, steel softens long before it starts melting).

    But the existence of gasoline torches (and the U.S. Army has a JP-8 version, JP-8/jet fuel has even more energy than gasoline) apparently doesn't phase the 9/11 conspiracy theorists. So it goes.

    - Badtux the Metal-working Penguin

    ReplyDelete
  9. They worked iron and steel in the freaking Middle Ages over coal and wood fires in blacksmith shops. They knew, even then, that they could make a fire burn hotter by blowing air on in, which is why they invented bellows.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Hijacked?? Where? How?

    I work with metal a fair amount myself.

    Let's say the rebuttals are correct and that is exactly why these three buildings came down.

    Common sense is where the answer is.

    No way did the structural steel in these massive structures in not just one but three buildings reach the correct temperature all over at the same time to cause three perfect implosion type of collapses.

    Correct temperature here means where the metal becomes compromised and can fail according to what's written here.

    ReplyDelete
  11. "Hijacked" because there were at least six posts after that, which I deleted. Most of them I deleted without a trace.

    This point needs to be rammed home: The steel softened, it did not have to melt. Not with thousands of tons of steel and concrete above it. Once that started to move, game over.

    ReplyDelete
  12. I guess you did not read what I wrote. I ram this. Used your parameters and never went to melt anything. You make my point. I agree that integrity was compromised. If it moved in one spot and not the other because I say using common sense the steel did not "soften" equally all over this massive structures structural beams at the right time. Thus - no way in hell could these buildings have imploded the way they did. Especially the towers. They would have fallen off to the side.

    This premise is just as legitimate as any other here.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Well, I asked an actual architect who has designed tall buildings who was familiar with the design of the WTC towers (he wasn't one of their designers but he was active in the NYC architectural community at the time they were built). He points at the hangers that hung the floors to the central core as the weakest point of the system, the central core tunnel would serve as a flue to concentrate oxygen on the burning fuel and soften those hangers (which were much smaller than girders) long before the girders themselves softened. When those hangers went, the steel girders would fall in at the core... which would suck in the exterior shell girders due to the exterior shell also being a weight-bearing part of the design but having much smaller steel components than the girders supporting the floors. Once that happened the top floors would fall onto the floor whose girders just fell and the whole thing would pancake under the weight of those tons of upper floors falling (F=mV, remember high school physics? Those upper floors were *massive* m). Boom. Implosion. No conspiracy theories needed, just an understanding of how the buildings were designed and built.

    By and large the various conspiracy theories assume a competence on the part of the Bush Administration that was nowhere evident. They couldn't even gin up convincing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, for cryin' out loud...

    - Badtux the Scientific Penguin

    ReplyDelete
  14. Ladies and Gentlemen:

    OK, that's it. This is not the place for debating 9-11 conspiracy theories. You all have blogs of your own.

    This comment thread is closed.

    ReplyDelete