Molten metal vs. Molten steel

Originally posted by Griff

Can you give me some more detail about this? I've been thinking along these lines lately myself. Any specs or whatever info would be greatful. Thanks.

I had initially wondered if they'd used some of the new HIT thermobaric variants on the floors below the strike. Went and did some fishing around in the literature and ran across someone studying rupturing box beams with thermobarics.

Since the WTC used box beams, I came up with the half-arsed idea that you could have destroyed the building's structural integrity with a minimum of obvious external damage by partially filling some of the core members with a thermobaric, either gaseous (old tech) or HIT sludge (new) and popping them open like a firecracker in a tin can, after which you could smack the top of the building down with another charge, causing a pancake-like collapse.

It leaves something to be desired, but I still think it's worth tossing in the option pile.

Tom, don't you think that huge rubble pile would go along way to cover up any radioactive isotopes deep within the rubble? Like at Chernobyl they smothered it with various materials but the WTC had the benefit of having 110 stories worth of skyscraper to smother it.

Originally posted by VicRH
Tom, don't you think that huge rubble pile would go along way to cover up any radioactive isotopes deep within the rubble? Like at Chernobyl they smothered it with various materials but the WTC had the benefit of having 110 stories worth of skyscraper to smother it.

Well, maybe, but.

If you just wanted to cover it up, you might be able to do so.

The problems I see are these:

1) You got a big plume of crap coming off the collapse. That would surely have isotopes in it, you couldn't plan for it to be contained. But people would be picking this stuff up on meters for quite a while, and at the level of activity you'd need to produce steel-melting heat in the rubble, you'd be killing people left and right in the downwind footprint.

2) A lack of immediately dead workers and firemen.

3) A fission nuke wouldn't leave THAT much hot core material in a contiguous wad - it's a bomb, the core is ungodly hot and is nothing but a really dense plasma during the bang. Stuff is going to be dispersed. No one spot of it, even if it was white hot, is going to melt a beam. In a Chernobyl sort of accident, the core material flows into a blob at the bottom of the containment and keeps reacting. You actually design the bottom of the containment to keep it from pooling so you have a chance to spread it out to a non-critical state.

With a theoretical pure fusion weapon, you wouldn't produce enough induced radioactivity to keep steel molten although you'd be killing people for a few days.

In a fission bomb, what's left is atomized and dispersed. Grant you, it wouldn't have left the building area because it mostly fell in and didn't blow out (much) in this nuke theory, but still there wouldn't be enough to be critical. Hell, there's not enough in the bomb to be critical before it's compressed. So all you'd have left generating heat is short half-life isotopes.

4) Say you HAD some situation where you had enough of some short-term isotope that generated heat from straight decay to melt steel all over the basement. I can't for the life of me figure one out, I even thought about really atypical stuff like Pu238 bombs (no one's ever made one). But melting steel into puddles takes a lot of total heat energy. Any isotope in a non-critical state that gets THAT hot just from decay is going to be spewing the zoomies. Now, when Mr Construction Man unearths the pool o' metal, it's still molten. You would have to figure that in order for the metal to still be molten from straight decay, it would still have to be very very radioactive when the guy opened it up and peeked.

If you didn't have a squad of dead firemen and construction workers before, I'd have expected one when you pulled up that beam or dug into the rubble.

Tom

Must admit I'm not against it, but it's a hard sell. Maybe for the cascade down, but then you've got those well-documented rows of cutter charges going off in multi-floor increments--those white out-gassings across a whole floorplate just below the collapse wave as the tower is exploded.

Is this what you'd expect to see with thermobarics? I'd rather think a whole ten-floor-or-so section would just pop at once, no?

Also, can you imagine the scale of the intervention necessary to get to the core box columns in the sub-basements--drill and load and prep 47 of them without getting noticed? That's a major job with serious equipment. Drills/torches to pierce 4+ inches of steel, barrels and barrels of highly incendiary goop to pump, the pumps themselves, etc... Likewise throughout the entire structure, where you had tenants and maintenance people all the time.

From the POV of simple practicality, placing small bombs with a big bang is much less invasive.

And no, I've not seen any other explosive demolitions on that scale either, but we do have three to examine on the day of 9/11.

Let's not forget WTC 7 is an equal partner in this, as it also had the same thermal hotspots documented in the NASA/satellite pics and from eyewitness testimony, yet it collapsed in classic CD fashion and did not have box columns but a very complex lower structure of I-beams cantilevering the bldg out to the northwest over the ConEd substation.

So, whatever it was, it was not exclusively thermobaric. Unless they simply flooded a sub-basement floor at WTC 7 and threw a match in around 5 pm.

As for the idea that trapped organics and combustible materials acted as fuel in a kind of furnace to keep the steel hot, I see two problems with that. First, there was essentially none found on the site above-ground (this is one of the more important anomalies btw), so I have trouble accepting that enough of the office furnishings, etc, somehow made it into the sub-basements.

And the stuff in the sub-basements was mostly mechanical equipment and cars--is this enough of a fuel source? Also, can these materials, which burn at relatively low temps, maintain such a high level of temp to produce the molten steel? Is keeping a lid on it with the collapsed material above it really going to let it act like an insulator/pressure cooker, so that the temps can be maintained? And do you simply have enough stuff to keep that reaction going for literally weeks?

As for air entry, I believe you're correct that the subway and Path tunnels would have supplied the necessary air circulation as they all had to penetrate the bathtub to service the complex. There were also corridors to various parts of the complex that would also have provided air.

And beside the meteors, some other very interesting artifacts actually not shipped to China under cover of night are several large structural columns twisted into curlicues. When the CDI clean-up guys found them, they were dumbfounded. The beams had no cracks or stress fractures, but were bent like spaghetti, and metal-workers stated they'd never seen anything like it and that this was impossible without foundry-like temps, otherwise they would have shattered.

[edit on 27-6-2007 by gottago]

The molten metal flowing out of the 81st floor of the South Tower just before it was destroyed was not steel but lead from the casings of many racks of lead batteries stored on that very floor. They had been stored there as backup to the computers used by Fuji Bank in case of a power failure. The journalist Christopher Bollyn revealed this originally:

I agree to an extent. But if you look at where the plane hit the floor and the top area of the building is actually bowing. This means the structure on one side may partially be failing. If the floor had already received damage then chances are in was leaning to the way the building was bowing. Thus the metal or "lead" as you propose would only be coming from that one corner. Path of least resistance. Simple physics.

As for the battery theory; The initial impact of the plane and the resulting explosion would have burned almost all the jet fuel away. It was little more then pouring gasoline on a campfire. This initial explosion would not even have been enough to melt the casing the lead is in, let alone be able to burn directly on the batteries in order to produce your lead theory. Again this is simple.

[edit on 27-6-2007 by Tahlen]

[edit on 27-6-2007 by Tahlen]

[edit on 27-6-2007 by Tahlen]

Originally posted by bokinsmowl

Will a gopher tunnel induct air? Probably not as the air would need to be pushed through multiple stories of debris.

i just dont see the tunnels being blocked off enough to be "air tight"... those fires were strong enough to create a pretty good vacuum i'd assume. air has a way of finding its way through especially when its being sucked.

ps. still looking for a good diagram of the subway layout

The main argument here is the fact that the molten areas were molten for this long and the reports of the temperatures being hotter then that of a normal fire. The fact that there is molten steel in the bottoms of the buildings is a massive clue, along with beams being sheared basically from this supposed heat.. Regardless of how hot the areas are there is no fire capable of melting steel. No "normal" fire that is.

Originally posted by JIMC5499

Originally posted by Griff
What other metals were available in enough quantity to even pool in the first place? The only thing would be aluminum in my mind. And we've already ruled out that molten aluminum would be misinterpreted for steel because of color. If you saw a pool of silvery liquid, would you call it molten steel? I doubt you would, even if you'd never seen molten steel or molten aluminum before. Just a guess.

There are dozens of metals that were there in sufficient quantities. As a matter of fact it doesn't have to be just one type of metal. Any molten metal found would have to be a mixture of several different types.

I'm sorry, but really, what other amounts of metal would be there to produce that much molten metal? The fact that the pools stayed that hot for as long as they did should be an immediate give away.

Originally posted by gottago
Tom

Must admit I'm not against it, but it's a hard sell. Maybe for the cascade down, but then you've got those well-documented rows of cutter charges going off in multi-floor increments--those white out-gassings across a whole floorplate just below the collapse wave as the tower is exploded.

Is this what you'd expect to see with thermobarics? I'd rather think a whole ten-floor-or-so section would just pop at once, no?

First, I don't believe in the "cutter charges", and you probably shouldn't either if you're a serious proponent of the nuke theory. After all, if it was conventionally demolished, why invoke a nuke too?

I think you're seeing a classic pancake - the "cutter charges" are floors collapsing internally and you're seeing air between the floors being blown out through the windows.

As for the big pop, I think that's what you saw right below the plane strike area, in order to initiate the collapse. The core member breaches wouldn't leave much of a mark - the material is contained within the beam. You don't need to blow it to smithereens, that's going to require a lot of material. What you need to do is buckle or rupture the box in one spot, at which point a box girder loses most of its compression strength.

Also, can you imagine the scale of the intervention necessary to get to the core box columns in the sub-basements--drill and load and prep 47 of them without getting noticed? That's a major job with serious equipment. Drills/torches to pierce 4+ inches of steel, barrels and barrels of highly incendiary goop to pump, the pumps themselves, etc... Likewise throughout the entire structure, where you had tenants and maintenance people all the time.

From the POV of simple practicality, placing small bombs with a big bang is much less invasive.

Can't disagree with you here, it's an issue.

If I were going to do it, I'd look at replacing most of a shift of maintenance guys to buy time. But you could also just whack them - you're about to drop the building on them anyway so it's not like they'll be missed. Who goes in the basement utility area that you couldn't replace, dispatch elsewhere or kill? It's not like they're doing tours down there.

Also you've got the entire "pull the building" thing - if you buy into that part then certainly there's a lot of people in on it, and wasn't the building owner being implicated in this by some of you guys too? With that much cooperation you could do anything. But even if you didn't have it, if you could get the stuff in within an hour or so you could just render the basement staff harmless and go your merry way. It would buy more time if you could replace a few staff in the management chain at some point earlier. Was there a new maintenance crew chief six months previous? Or some new security management?

Alternatively, you wouldn't have to do it in the basement if you had leased out a section of a floor that encompassed the core. Then you can put up a faux office and do what you want in leisure in the back rooms. Done that way, I'd look at who owned the floor right above where the beams were still intact - you know, when it fell, there were beams still standing that fell over a few seconds later? Look about the height of those before they fell. Did someone have the floor at that point? Or the part of it around the core area?

(and did they also have offices in the more damaged areas of wtc7?)

If you had access like that, you could go back to standard shaped charges, and you could take your time doing it.

And no, I've not seen any other explosive demolitions on that scale either, but we do have three to examine on the day of 9/11.

Let's not forget WTC 7 is an equal partner in this, as it also had the same thermal hotspots documented in the NASA/satellite pics and from eyewitness testimony, yet it collapsed in classic CD fashion and did not have box columns but a very complex lower structure of I-beams cantilevering the bldg out to the northwest over the ConEd substation.

Didn't it also have a crap-load of heating oil in tanks in the top floor?

So, whatever it was, it was not exclusively thermobaric. Unless they simply flooded a sub-basement floor at WTC 7 and threw a match in around 5 pm.

You know, that sounds funny but don't discount it either. You've got subway access right? Any chance of simply rolling a midnight special up under the building and setting it off? Was the subway extensively damaged except directly under the building?

As for the idea that trapped organics and combustible materials acted as fuel in a kind of furnace to keep the steel hot, I see two problems with that. First, there was essentially none found on the site above-ground (this is one of the more important anomalies btw), so I have trouble accepting that enough of the office furnishings, etc, somehow made it into the sub-basements.

Isn't that sort of an indication that's where it DID end up? If it's not above ground? Didn't most of the building end up in the sub-basements?

And the stuff in the sub-basements was mostly mechanical equipment and cars--is this enough of a fuel source? Also, can these materials, which burn at relatively low temps, maintain such a high level of temp to produce the molten steel? Is keeping a lid on it with the collapsed material above it really going to let it act like an insulator/pressure cooker, so that the temps can be maintained? And do you simply have enough stuff to keep that reaction going for literally weeks?

Well, you heard VicRH say that the fires were still going for three months in the rubble pile. So something was burning in there, and for quite a while after the molten steel was out. I'd still like to know how much molten metal there actually was, as I said in the other thread, it makes a difference in figuring up how much heat source you need to account for it.

As for the temperature, it could be an issue, I think you could get it hot enough with a draft, but the hotter it burns the faster it's gone. Still, it was on fire under there for a long time, so there's enough fuel for that. Still wondering - were there gas lines and were they totally closed? I've heard there were some big gas fires but I don't really know if that's true.

Still, you're losing too much heat to stay molten for any length of time without an external source. And being heated by a nuclear bomb isn't special heat, it figures up the same way as any other thermodynamic problem. Three weeks is a long time, it's a big big temperature differential, and it's not insulated that well. And back to a point I made earlier, it seems really obvious when looking at photos of the rubble that it wasn't melted above ground. There's not a lot of melted debris, or melt splash, or even soft, rounded, nearly-melted-at-one-time debris on the surface. Whatever did the melting did it under the rubble. So I think that's a big lump on the "nukes heated it all to melting in a nanosecond and it fell into the basement" idea, beyond some other quite major issues in the physics arena.

And beside the meteors, some other very interesting artifacts actually not shipped to China under cover of night are several large structural columns twisted into curlicues. When the CDI clean-up guys found them, they were dumbfounded. The beams had no cracks or stress fractures, but were bent like spaghetti, and metal-workers stated they'd never seen anything like it and that this was impossible without foundry-like temps, otherwise they would have shattered.

I've seen hardened steel bend into really neat shapes after explosions with high brisance material, the rapidity of the bend makes the steel more ductile.

Yeah, if you melt it, you can reshape it, but what sort of shape was the beam in? Do you have any photos? Here's the trick - look for sharp edges. Did the beam have flanges or relatively sharp corners? Were they still sharp-edged after? Any tapped bolt holes? Were the threads or edges intact? Paint? Coatings? In order to make the steel more ductile by heating, you'd have to heat the beam all the way through. But neither a heat flash or neutron flux would do that, at least not cleanly. A couple milliseconds of heat flash hot enough to heat the beam through to the point it becomes uniformly ductile would ablate the surface and soften the outer layers to the point they start to flow. Nearly any very rapid energy transfer to a large mass of metal will damage the surface before it starts to soften. You get round mooshy edges. I bet you don't see it on those.

Originally posted by mythatsabigprobe
Thermite stops burning once it's components are used up. I've seen it used to weld railway tracks and it typically burns for about 3 minutes then extinguishes itself.

Underground fires can burn for very long periods, in fact there's been one going on for 45 years in Pennsylvania

Smoldering is probably a better term, but the result is the same - the fuel is being consumed and generating huge amounts of heat, only the flame is missing because of the lack of oxygen.

I'm sorry but I don't see anything unusual about the fires under the rubble of the WTC buildings, or the presence of molten steel.

You just contradicted yourself. You say that the thermites can burn and then the charges are used up the thermite is gone. So what happens to all the steel that is melted in the process. It cools just as fast the charge being burnt up? This makes no sense at all.

You also state that you have seen thermite used and that you "don't see anything unusual about the fires under the rubble of the WTC buildings, or the presence of molten steel."

huh? You said you have seen it used yet you dont find it unusual to see molten steel at the bottom of the buildings and for that long?

Thank you for proving the threads point.

Originally posted by Tom Bedlam
Alternatively, you wouldn't have to do it in the basement if you had leased out a section of a floor that encompassed the core. Then you can put up a faux office and do what you want in leisure in the back rooms. Done that way, I'd look at who owned the floor right above where the beams were still intact - you know, when it fell, there were beams still standing that fell over a few seconds later? Look about the height of those before they fell. Did someone have the floor at that point? Or the part of it around the core area?

Who signed Sakher Hammad's WTC Basement Level Pass?

www.whatreallyhappened.com...

Seams like it could have been all too easy. Read the whole post there. It contains information on lawyers being indited for helping the highjackers obtain false ID's and such.

Originally posted by Tahlen
You just contradicted yourself. You say that the thermites can burn and then the charges are used up the thermite is gone. So what happens to all the steel that is melted in the process. It cools just as fast the charge being burnt up? This makes no sense at all.

No, it actually makes a lot of sense. I'd hazard a guess you haven't had any college physics or thermodynamics?

The rate at which heat leaves a material is directly related to the differential in temperature between it and the sink it's delivering the heat to. In fact, without looking at a book, I believe the relationship is the natural log of the differential. The hotter it is, the faster it cools.

Once the energy input is gone, the molten steel begins to cool, quite rapidly, and will soon solidify. It doesn't stay molten for weeks.

Thank you for proving the threads point.

I imagine it can be tough interpreting comments with no training or education in the field. Sometimes I feel the same way when Lady Bedlam tries to explain cricket to me.

tom

Yeah, if you melt it, you can reshape it, but what sort of shape was the beam in? Do you have any photos?

Firstly I am surprised you haven't even seen any pictures of the horseshoe like I-beams bent without fractures. I take it you have seen the meteorites. There are plenty of images. redeye.chicagotribune.com...

Here is a short video of one of the 'horseshoes' (still trying to find the original source for this video)



If there was nothing strange about it then it simply wouldn't be an issue.

This is very interesting too, notice the statement 'exposed to temperatures as hot as the inner earth (referring to the molten core of the earth i assume)'.





[edit on 27-6-2007 by VicRH]

[edit on 27-6-2007 by VicRH]

Nice videos.

Also notice that he says the paper was carbonized.

Carbonization
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
For the porting of Macintosh software, see Carbon (API).
Carbonization/Carbonisation is the term for the conversion of an organic substance into carbon or a carbon-containing residue through pyrolysis. It is often used in organic chemistry with reference to the generation of coal gas and coal tar from raw coal. Fossil fuels in general are the products of the carbonization of vegetable matter.

When biomaterial is exposed to sudden searing heat (as in the case of an atomic bomb explosion or pyroclastic flow from a volcano, for instance), it can be carbonized extremely quickly, turning it into solid carbon. In the destruction of Herculaneum by a volcano, many organic objects such as furniture were carbonized by the intense heat.

Source: Wicki.

I'm getting closer to a temperature.

carbonization
The final
pyrolysis temperature applied controls the degree of carbonization and the
residual content of foreign elements, e.g. at T ~ 1200 K the carbon content
of the residue exceeds a mass fraction of 90 wt.%, whereas at T ~ 1600 K
more than 99 wt.% carbon is found.
1995, 67, 484

Source: www.iupac.org...

1200 K = 926.85 C = 1700 F

1600 K = 1326.85 C = 2420.33 F

Source: www.onlineconversion.com...

It would be nice if they would do an analysis to see how much it carbonized. It could tell us the temperature it reached.

Originally posted by VicRH


If there was nothing strange about it then it simply wouldn't be an issue.

This is very interesting too, notice the statement 'exposed to temperatures as hot as the inner earth (referring to the molten core of the earth i assume)'.

Sweet. I'll take a look at these when I get a chance today - I've screwed off all morning on ATS. Got to stop that.

"hot as the inner earth" sounds pretty overly dramatic, no? It could be an issue, or simply news, because it's odd looking. Like a straw stuck through a board by a tornado. Eye catching but meaningless.


There's a couple of things wrong there. Temperature is not heat. That sounds odd but it's true in an engineering sense. I could expose YOU to "temperatures as hot as the inner earth" for a fraction of a millisecond and you would only feel a hot flash. Heat is the total energy transferred, which is going to be a temperature-time product sort of thing. The calculation isn't trivial unless the setup's pretty simple.

Exposing a beam of that size to a few milliseconds of "inner earth temperature" isn't going to heat the inside of the beam for squat. It might damage the surface. See what I mean? Fast heat transfer tends to damage surfaces but leave the thing solid in the middle. Like quick-frying a frozen fish. It may be cooked on the outside but it will be hard, raw and bloody on the inside.

An engineer or physicist typically wouldn't state something that way, either, because they'd be mocked cruelly.

My first split second impression - the edges look mighty sharp, don't they? If it was melted to the point it became softened, and you got that mass hot all the way through in a split second, you wouldn't expect sharpness, a clean surface, or well defined profiles. It also would tend to mush in the bend instead of making that nice bow.

It doesn't look a lot different than metal I've seen deformed by explosions, bigger but not different in character.

Originally posted by Griff


I'm getting closer to a temperature.

1600 K = 1326.85 C = 2420.33 F

You should consider though it got much hotter in other areas and that temperature is not neccasarly the maximum temperatures reached. But it does show that areas reached at least this temperature (2420.33 F). I think some of the thermal hot spots taken from a satellite show similar temperatures. Good stuff Griff keep digging.

Originally posted by Tom Bedlam


"hot as the inner earth" sounds pretty overly dramatic, no? It could be an issue, or simply news, because it's odd looking. Like a straw stuck through a board by a tornado. Eye catching but meaningless.

Either way you look at it, it shows us how the news can be blatently wrong and/or misleading on an important subject. Its strange because we know how the media gets complaints when they misreport something so they usually make sure they have their facts straight or atleast have something to back up their claims before they do. They just don't blurt out 'hot as the earths core' to describe the heat from any typical fire. Example 'god lord, we had a house burn down today as it was exposed to temperatures as hot as the earths core' unless it actually did.

There's a couple of things wrong there. Temperature is not heat. That sounds odd but it's true in an engineering sense. I could expose YOU to "temperatures as hot as the inner earth" for a fraction of a millisecond and you would only feel a hot flash. Heat is the total energy transferred, which is going to be a temperature-time product sort of thing. The calculation isn't trivial unless the setup's pretty simple.

It seems like you assume we either have superheating or nothing at all. These samples were likely outside the range of the most intense areas of heat and were 'heated' for a longer duration of time though thermal conductivity or something rather than just being exposed for a millisecond and warping.

My first split second impression - the edges look mighty sharp, don't they? If it was melted to the point it became softened, and you got that mass hot all the way through in a split second, you wouldn't expect sharpness, a clean surface, or well defined profiles. It also would tend to mush in the bend instead of making that nice bow.

I wouldn't be so sure about that, getting it hot enough allows it to warp and deformations could easily become razor sharp is such a chaotic and dynamic scenario where you have all that random debris falling all over the place.

Again I think your assuming these samples were examples of super heating where in fact I think they are more like proximity effects of super heating, away from the epicenter. If those I-Beams were hot enough they would soften enough to easily bow like that under the tensions they carry.

It doesn't look a lot different than metal I've seen deformed by explosions, bigger but not different in character.

Metal is pretty miscellaneous and can be very weak. Steel is generally v.strong. Did you mean smaller?

Originally posted by VicRHThey just don't blurt out 'hot as the earths core' to describe the heat from any typical fire. Example 'god lord, we had a house burn down today as it was exposed to temperatures as hot as the earths core' unless it actually did.

But you see, when you say that, I'm getting the idea you're confusing temperature with heat, and I'm sure they are.

Look, I've got a little pocket oxyacetylene torch in the 'big hammer' bin here. I don't use it that often, but it comes in handy. I'm pretty sure the flame it puts out is "hotter than the earth's core" - in terms of temperature. But if I turned it on a big I-beam, the beam won't suddenly do the Pringle Warp. Why? Heat is not temperature. I've "exposed it to temperatures that hot" - but there's not enough heat produced by the torch to actually heat the beam dramatically, and it's conducting the heat away faster than I can apply it.

Which has more heat relative to ambient - a white hot needle, or a bathtub full of lukewarm water?

It seems like you assume we either have superheating or nothing at all. These samples were likely outside the range of the most intense areas of heat and were 'heated' for a longer duration of time though thermal conductivity or something rather than just being exposed for a millisecond and warping.

If you're assuming it's all heat from a nuke going off, pretty much all you will HAVE is superheating. The heat flash part of it is over pretty fast. That's why you had left-over I beams at ground zero at times. They didn't melt because they were butt-on to it, or were in a shadow. The ones that got a good dose vaporized. What's abnormal and maybe actually really tough to get is "hot enough all the way through to bend, but not to soften on the surface"

I wouldn't be so sure about that, getting it hot enough allows it to warp and deformations could easily become razor sharp is such a chaotic and dynamic scenario where you have all that random debris falling all over the place.

It's not the deformations that were sharp - it's the original shape of the metal. The metal didn't soften on the surface sufficiently to become plastic. Heating it rapidly from the outside, that is what you'd expect - very soft surfaces.

Again I think your assuming these samples were examples of super heating where in fact I think they are more like proximity effects of super heating, away from the epicenter. If those I-Beams were hot enough they would soften enough to easily bow like that under the tensions they carry.

In a nuclear scenario, very fast heating is all you'll have, except for that produced by burning material afterwards. However, if the heating only happened in the rubble, you've got time to soften all the way through.

Metal is pretty miscellaneous and can be very weak. Steel is generally v.strong. Did you mean smaller?

No, I meant the WTC steel in the picture was bigger than bridge structure or railroad steel. I've seen some bent up infrastructure steel that was pretty dramatic. It doesn't always do that though.

Originally posted by Tom Bedlam


But you see, when you say that, I'm getting the idea you're confusing temperature with heat, and I'm sure they are.

No, they say 'exposed to temps' as in heated by temps. This is trivial imo.

I've "exposed it to temperatures that hot" - but there's not enough heat produced by the torch to actually heat the beam dramatically, and it's conducting the heat away faster than I can apply it.

I get your point but I am sure your torch doesnt burn at a million degrees. If a fireball of that temp touched steel it would heat instantly and conduct that heat very fast like you say, but the heat would be so overwhelming it would soak it all up, i believe, i just don't think it would require prolonged exposure at that sort of temperature.

If you're assuming it's all heat from a nuke going off, pretty much all you will HAVE is superheating. The heat flash part of it is over pretty fast. That's why you had left-over I beams at ground zero at times. They didn't melt because they were butt-on to it, or were in a shadow. The ones that got a good dose vaporized. What's abnormal and maybe actually really tough to get is "hot enough all the way through to bend, but not to soften on the surface"

interesting..

No, I meant the WTC steel in the picture was bigger than bridge structure or railroad steel. I've seen some bent up infrastructure steel that was pretty dramatic. It doesn't always do that though.

well not only were steel members bent like horseshoes but they were heated to the point of becoming a liquid and probably beyond. When have we ever seen this before? The only time I have ever heard of materials like that getting turned into a lava would be Chernobyl.

Crematories are above, like say, 2500 degrees. The people are disintegrated. That if there were people in the building, how did they peek out and look or jump? How are they not immediatly, if they have a heat that intense to warp or mess with the structure of steel, how are they people still alive? It's Impossible. To weaken something 50 feet away would of melted you to be in the vicinity.
~ Jim Nesch (Owner/Operator Nesch Brass Foundry)

Here's some video's that explains it, it tells you about the molten metal and how Thermite/Thermate plays into it
The google video's being a pain in the butt, but here's the 1st and 2nd link

[edit on 28-6-2007 by Kalooeh]

Originally posted by VicRH

No, they say 'exposed to temps' as in heated by temps. This is trivial imo.

Not at all - it's a crucial lack of understanding. Confusing temperature with heat is like confusing power and energy. It leads to you making incorrect conclusions. "Was exposed to temps" is meaningless unless you know how much energy the temperature source can deliver and over what timeframe the temperatures were present.

I get your point but I am sure your torch doesnt burn at a million degrees. If a fireball of that temp touched steel it would heat instantly and conduct that heat very fast like you say, but the heat would be so overwhelming it would soak it all up, i believe, i just don't think it would require prolonged exposure at that sort of temperature.

Well, we were talking about "as hot as the core of the earth!" Lots of things are "as hot as". What matters is how much total energy can be transferred by.

Now when you start talking about being exposed to the heat flash of a nuke at close range, you're back into the point I'm trying to make. It doesn't heat it all the way through instantaneously to the same temperature. With a heat flash, you get heat transfer into a beam faster than the beam can transport it, so there's a huge temperature gradient. The surface layers ablate, the "rind" if you will softens but the core may remain cool for several milliseconds, it depends on the steel, its thickness, the energy delivery rate and a host of secondary factors. But the issue is that the outer surface is going to be damaged, and if bent while in that condition the "rind" will become plastic and "ripple" in the bend area. There's a weird annealing pattern you see also with the outer part annealed and grain remaining in the center.

well not only were steel members bent like horseshoes but they were heated to the point of becoming a liquid and probably beyond. When have we ever seen this before? The only time I have ever heard of materials like that getting turned into a lava would be Chernobyl.

Nothing on the surface that I have been able to see in photographs were heated to the point of losing sharp edges, nor in some photos to the point of losing what appears to be a coating or paint of some sort. The liquid part seems to only be happening to steel that's underneath, and not all of that. Do you see any steel "splats" on the surface, or saggy melted looking structural steel?

As far as Chernobyl, the core material melted from internal heat but after it spread around some it didn't even melt/spall through the containment. The core material is all in one place, though, as opposed to a nuke where it's plasma and gone in a millisecond. You don't get that long-term heating with nuclear weapons - if you don't care much about your long term health you can walk around ground zero the next day with adequate protection against breathing in radioactive particulates.

I've been out to Trinity a couple of times and there's no melted pit. You get all the heat you're going to in the flash, after that it's just remnant heat from objects that are radiating away what they absorbed. There are bits and pieces of trinitite, where the sand was fused a few millimeters down by the flash. But it didn't keep on melting underneath. And that was a really big weapon as opposed to what the 911/nuke theory is claiming. Sand isn't that different from concrete - did the sand vanish? Melt into bubbling pools?

Oh, btw, I hadn't considered that you guys might not know that. If any ATS'er wants to go, the public can go to Trinity Ground Zero the first Saturday of April and October. You have to sign up for it ahead of time.