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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries
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To: Raymond Duray who wrote (64867)6/10/2005 9:24:03 PM
From: Slagle  Read Replies (2) of 74559
 
Raymond Re: "melting steel" Plastic explosives and shaped charges of various sorts could have been attached to the building columns and detonated. The airplanes could have been flown into the towers by remote control, this too is possible but to coordinate all this would have required amazing talents and resources. And I have to admit that there is lots about the whole business that smells. It could have been an inside job though and if it was such an operation that would explain much that has happened in the aftermath.

But I have one really big problem with these folks who set out to offer an alternate explanation as they seem to get all wound up in the idea that a big fuel oil fire could not "melt" the steel tubing building columns. They go on and on about the need to heat the steel to 2200F or 3000F to melt the steel but to collapse such a structure there would be no need to melt the steel.

Mild steel loses its strength rapidly with an increase in temperature, following a curve with the yield point dropping rapidly beyond 600-700F and mild steel is as plastic and limp and weak as a noodle by 1300F. Take a carbon steel bar half inch in diameter and heat it with an acetylene torch to 900F which is dull faint cherry (the lowest temperature at which the steel begins to glow faintly in a darkened room). At this temperature you can easily bend the steel in your bare hands and at room temperature you cannot bend it at all. Heat it to bright cherry (1400F) and a five year old can bend it for it has less strength than similar sized piece of rubber. An A36 steel which might be able to withstand a compressive stress of 40,000psi without permanent deformation at room temperature would begin to yield past its elastic limit at 1000psi compressive at 1300F.

And a large fuel oil fire would generate those sorts of temperatures easily; indeed that is why an oil burning steam boiler has all the elaborate duplicate low water shut-offs. About two minutes is all it takes to buckle the steel tubes if a tube type boiler runs out of water.

And any good engineer knows all this so why do all these guys with the alternate explanations go on and on about "melting" the columns? There would be no need to melt the columns.

And the portland cement casings around the columns wouldn't help either. When you heat concrete the water of hydration is driven away and the cement turns to powder. This would take a while, but even with the cement intact the interior columns would have reached dangerous temperatures as long as that fire raged. I read somewhere that the lower floor columns had asbestos casing but the upper floors where the plane struck had only portland cement.

Anyway, I still think that you may be right about the conspiracy but to try to explain away the government version of the collapse by stressing the impossibility of "melting" the building columns is a mistake.
Slagle
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