<<<Temper, temper. Mr. Nielson may simply be not the sharpest knife in the drawer, and not a traitor at all.>>>
Could be. After spending a ton of time this weekend reading horror stories and bogus collapse theories, I'm not feeling very magnanimous.
<<<Steel starts to lose tensile strength well below the melt temperature. From what I have been able to determine, kerosene can actually create enough heat to cause deformation of A36 steel members.>>>
If you put it in a blast furnace and feed enough oxygen to it, sure. Acetylene won't melt steel either unless you feed pure oxygen to it at a ratio of around 4 to 1. Air is what? 30-40% oxygen? I even have my own 50K BTU kerosene heater. It works great and puts out a ton of heat. The only problem is if you put it in a closed room, it uses up all the oxygen in about a half hour and shuts itself off. It'll still keep things pretty toasty if you leave a window open so it can breath, but the cool air hitting the room does tend to keep the temperature down.
Unless you've seen something I haven't, there hasn't been a single experiment conducted under WTC conditions. For example; build a room according to WTC design specs, load the ceiling with enough free weight to match the WTC design specs, then put a tray of kerosene on the floor and a couple holes in the wall, and see what it does. That's a lot different than proving it's possible to design a high temp kerosene blast furnace. Of course you might have trouble using up your grant money that way since I doubt it would cost more than $20K to put it together.
<<<2. All of the steel columns were encased in concrete.
This is not the case at the WTC towers. They were only protected by 2-hour rated Gypsum Wallboard Cladding which would have been stripped away (to an extent) by flying debris on the impact floors, exposing the steel directly to the flame.>>>
Have a look at the columns in the scrap yard before they were destroyed. There's still concrete stuck to most of them. The exterior walls were certainly of concrete and the columns were incorporated into those walls. Your most likely method of construction would be sheet metal studs attached to the walls, then packed with insulation. Your sheetrock would attach to the studs.
It's would also be typical in that kind of sheer wall construction to stagger your supports. The columns spanned several floors, so the idea would be along the lines of every other column would be attached to floors 1 and 3, and the others attached to 2 and 4. That way your joints, which are weaker, are not all at the same level.
9-11sculptureproject.org
<<<The spray on fireproofing protecting the underside of the trusses is a very fragile material that is easily stripped away by mechanical agitation.>>>
That would cover the points that came into violent contact with the planes. Of course, one might wonder why that mechanical agitation didn't affect those members at the time of impact, and still doesn't explain what happened to those portions not affected by mechanical agitation.
<<<Concrete and steel have approximately the same coeffiecient of expansion, and both transmit heat at pretty much the same rate.>>>
That was my point. The floors the trusses were supporting would tend to conduct heat away from the trusses, even without the insulation.
There is nothing scientific about any of the tests being conducted. Dangling a truss over a kerosene blast furnace doesn't prove anything other than that it's possible to construct a kerosene blast furnace capable of heating a truss dangled over it. I think that conjecture could have been stipulated without spending a dime on a project to prove it. There weren't any multi million dollar, high tech, special purpose kerosene blast furnaces in the WTC. |
