NIST report omissions and inaccuracies

Recently, bsbray, Griff and I have posted several large and quite extensive posts on quite a wide range of subjects. Instead of simply elongating a thread and diverging farther from the OP, I think a more prudent course of action is to start a new thread.

I will try and answer things in a more organised fashion even if it means cutting up posts so I am not replying "point by point". First I would like to start with misunderstandings.

Originally posted by exponent
I think it's unlikely you have developed a controlled demolition theory that doesn't require control over the initiating event

Originally posted by bsbray11
When was it my job to develop a theory as to what happened? Am I supposed to write a report about it, too? Where's my budget of hundreds of thousands of dollars? Where's my access to the crime scene? Where's my physical evidence? What have you got for me?

Originally posted by exponent
If not then NISTs report does cover important sections of the collapse for you.

Originally posted by bsbray11
So the reasoning is, if you can't do better yourself, then NIST is best, and therefore, I assume, correct by default. Or at least, I might as well not even try thinking for myself, because they've already done this report for me, and of course there's no way I can compete with that so I better just believe it. I got you.

You have misunderstood my statement here. What I was suggesting was in response to your claiming NIST ignored a lot of the physical destruction. My point was and is that if you believe that the towers may have been taken down by a controlled demolition, I think it is unlikely that whatever theory you subscribe to, it doesn't include control over the initiation of collapse.
Whether you have a fully developed theory or not is somewhat irrelevant, I was simply making the point that if anyone's theory of controlled demolition requires control of the initiating event (and frankly I cannot see how you could make a theory without it) then the NIST report does cover that section, and you will have to disagree with it.

Originally posted by exponent
Into its footprint? Surely you mean "over the entire WTC site"?

Originally posted by bsbray11
I think my choice of words more accurately reflect reality than yours.

Indeed it might. I was referring to WTC1 and 2, so apologies for that. WTC7 however did cause damage to surrounding buildings, even if its collapse was more contained than that of the towers.

Originally posted by exponent
there was relatively little core bracing and the exterior walls worked to handle the rest of the lateral loads.

Originally posted by bsbray11
I find that hard to believe based on what little I have seen of the construction of the building.

Indeed I was erroneously referring to WTC1 and 2 again. I apologise profusely, I was tired, the sun was in my eyes, etc etc. No excuses will do, so i will try to be a bit more careful when I get onto the section answering your questions in this post.

I think this is the end of the major misunderstandings, and so I move onward onto the actual issues raised!

1. NISTs fire modelling

Many claims have been made in the other thread and Seymour Butz tried to 'defend' NIST but unfortunately nobody who quoted this section of the report seems to have actually read it in depth! Allow me to quote:

Originally posted by bsbray11
The amount of heat they must assume was present, for example, to transfer enough heat, fast enough, to raise the temperatures of the steel enough within the time frame, are outrageous.
...
1,900,000 to 3,400,000 watts of power is equivalent to a few hundred wood stoves (look up wattage ratings for them yourself and compare), in a compartment comparable to a living room.

The question is, "Was NIST using this spray burner to replicate conditions inside the towers?". The answer is no, they weren't at all. This is an erroneous conclusion which has been replicated throughout the truther community. Indeed your quote comes verbatim from a 911review article here: 911review.com...

So what were NIST actually doing with this spray burner, and why did they focus so much energy into such a small space? Well their report explains this in full on the page you cited.

The accuracy of FDS predictions was then assessed using two different types of fire tests. In each case, the model predictions were generated prior to conducting the test.

The first series provided a measure of the ability of FDS to predict the thermal environment generated by a steady state fire. A spray burner generating 1.9 MW or 3.4 MW of power was ignited in a 23 ft by 11.8 ft by 12.5 ft high compartment. The temperatures near the ceiling approached 900 °C.

More detail is supplied if we examine the actual sub-reports relating to these tests (NCSTAR 1-5B and E):

The experiments reported here were designed to provide the data necessary to test the accuracy of the fire and thermal-structural simulations that were applied to model the WTC disaster. The experiments allowed comparison of measurements and predictions of a number of critical parameters, which facilitated a check of the accuracy of the predictions and ensured that the models were capturing properly the physics of fire dynamics and thermal-structural behavior.

As you can see, these tests were designed to check how accurately NISTs simulator code would simulate a fire with well known details. The spray burner was used to ensure immersion in flames of the structural elements in the compartment.

NISTs later series of tests did what you have erroneously described for the first series of tests. They investigated the characteristics of multiple workstations burning in a compartment. A spray burner was used for these tests too, but as NIST explains:

The spray burner was used to cause repeatable rapid ignition on one side of the adjacent workstation. The fuel used was a commercial blend of heptane isomers. Depending on the test, the burner was located abutting the top of a workstation partition at the east end of Workstation 1 or the west end of Workstation 2. The ignition fire intensity was a nominal 2 MW fire. The spray burner was operated for the first few minutes of the tests, for either 2 min or 10 min depending on the test scenario.
NIST NCSTAR 1-5E Page 20

As you can see, your criticism is invalid as NIST never made the conclusions you claimed they did. This is why a full and detailed reading of the NIST report is important. This sort of error is also the source for many false claims about how 'NIST tested floors but couldnt get them to collapse' when they did nothing of the sort.

2. Evaporated steel

This is a common claim, and has been repeated constantly over the period I have been researching and debating 911. Typically the people who are repeating this claim have never read the reports detailing the findings with regard to these pieces of steel and I suspect that to be the case here. I will quote from R Mackey's "On Debunking 911 Debunking" as it is a good reference source for a lot of these claims.

Dr. Biederman clearly indicates that the temperature of the sample had never exceeded 850 C, which is nowhere near steel vaporization temperature, well below steel melting temperature, and quite plausible in an ordinary fire.
...

A eutectic mixture is a mixture of two ingredients such that, even though the ingredients may not interact chemically, they mutually impede crystal formation, and as a result the mixture has a melting temperature much lower than that of either ingredient on its own. Think of ice mixed with salt – independently, water melts at 0 C while the melting temperature of salt is rather high, but the saltwater mixture melts at -10 C or even lower depending on the concentration. Something similar is happening with this steel sample. Somehow it has acquired sulfur, and though the eutectic mixture has not melted, it could melt at a lower temperature than ordinary steel. Dr. Biederman estimated the melting temperature of this particular eutectic mixture at 940 C. This is the eutectic temperature, i.e. the temperature at which the mixture melts and the ingredients will begin to separate.

As a result, the samples recovered from WTC 7 do not prove any extraordinary temperatures. Having said that, the existence of the eutectic mixture was a surprise to many scientists, and remains one of the details not fully understood to this day. What it is definitely not, however, is evidence of explosives.

This is an excellent summary of the issue at hand, and it is important to note that Therm?te typically burns at well over 2000C, temperatures high enough to completely melt the steel, however this is not what was seen in the investigation and as such we can rule out direct thermite contact.

3. Building Comparisons

In the previous thread, I suggested Ronan Point as a relatively close analog of the towers, I simply wish to correct one minor error regarding this here

Originally posted by bsbray11
Ronan Point didn't even come down, some of its balconies did. I always thought this was some kind of bad joke:

It is no joke, and those are not balconies. Those were apartments. For those of you not aware, this is a relatively well known image of Ronan Point:

A gas explosion on the 18th floor lead to a progressive collapse of that portion of the building. Of course the construction was absolutely nothing like WTC 1,2 or 7, but it is nevertheless a good representation of progressive collapse.

The other building brought for comparison was the First Interstate Bank (now the Aon Center). This is not a terrible analogy but there are a few problems with it:
When compared to WTC1 or 2

• Scale. The Aon Centre is approximately 1/3rd the size (volume) of WTC1 or 2
  
• Fireproofing. The lack of damage to the Aon Centre was attributed to well applied fireproofing. The impact of planes into WTC1 and 2, plus some doubt over the quality of applied fireproofing makes this quite an important point.
  
• Magnitude of fire. Fires in WTC1 and 2 were ignited over more floors simultaneously than were involved in the fire at the Aon Centre.
  
• Firefighting. The fires in the Aon Centre were actively fought within minutes of the fire spreading to multiple floors
  
• Construction. While the diagram you've provided shows a superficially similar construction to the WTC, there are few details available and the diagram does not show any floor framing details. This was a critical point of the WTC collapses

These are all factors that can be considered with enough information, I only provide this list to illustrate how a direct analogy canont be drawn. It is not possible to say "This building did not collapse, therefore WTC 1 or 2 should not have collapsed"

When compared to WTC7
The list for this comparison is much shorter, and indeed WTC7 is the more mysterious of the collapses.

• Construction. WTC7s failure relies upon a unique construction invoving long span asymmetrical framing. We have no details on floor framing for the Aon Centre
  
• Firefighting. WTC7 was left unfought for the entire day before it collapsed

Again I feel a direct comparison cannot be drawn, but the differences are obviously smaller. If we had more information about the Aon Centre we could make some judgements, but as it is I can't agree that it is a suitable direct comparison.

I think those 3 topics were the largest raised, but there were other things I wished to comment on directly.

Originally posted by bsbray11
Can you give me an example of something from one of their reports that illustrates your idea of the quality of these reports?

There is a lot to choose from, and I don't know whether you're looking for a sentence, a paragraph, a section or a paper. As it is particularly relevant to this thread, I will say that NCSTAR 1-5E is a good example of the work NIST did, and shows the quality of their work.

Originally posted by bsbray11
And something more important that I'm wondering now: whenever I contradict one of your views, do you always assume that I must instead believe the most absurd and opposite thing imaginable?

Not at all, I was simply giving an example. I have found that it is quite helpful to pre-empt the worst case scenario in order to point out that there are absurd extremes on 'both sides' as it were.

Originally posted by Griff
I challenge NIST's findings because they started with little to no (WTC 7) evidence at all. But, I do not blame NIST for this. The person who decided to "scoop and dump" is to blame for that.

Do you challenge their findings or do you doubt them? I ask because challenge would usually indicate that you have some evidence which shows them to be wrong, wheras doubt would indicate you have a lack of confidence in their analysis. I can accept the latter, but i'm not aware of anything qualifying for the former.
With regards to the "scoop and dump" comments, there is some doubt that structural elements in WTC7 were marked appropriately to determine their location. Even if this were the case though, an examination of the rubble pile would certainly yield more information than no examination at all, and I don't disagree with you on this point.

Originally posted by bsbray11
I want to see, whether in a model or creative drawing or whatever, what happens to all of these columns as the building moves in an accordion-like motion down into itself.

Originally posted by exponent
What you request is probably beyond our ability to simulate

Originally posted by bsbray11
I very seriously doubt that, and at any rate it only sounds like a cop-out. Someone should at least try to draw this out and explain how the hell it's supposed to happen. It's one of those physical behaviors that must be completely unprecedented and yet it makes or breaks the entire hypothesis

I'm really not sure what you're asking for here. What is beyond our ability to simulate is what happens to single columns or even reasonable groups of them in collapses like the WTC or WTC7. There is simply not enough data to be able to know what occured at various times in the building.

Take the mechanical properties of steel for example. Columns in the WTC would have been specified in terms of their yield strength. However this only guarantees the minimal yield strength. Because of this we cannot know what the actual yield strength of these columns were. It is an extremely complex topic to get into and I only hope to illustrate one of the many areas where we don't have reliable data. If you can explain in more detail what you are looking for I will do what I can, but I am no FEA expert.

Originally posted by bsbray11
Deformations really are irrelevant here. Looking at forces/temperatures required for certain deformations, you should really be looking for the ultimate strength. Things didn't just bend and sag, they actually broke free and severed at some point. This is the miraculous "big bang" or "primordial soup" moment that has yet to be demonstrated as possible, in either any lab test or simulation.

This also confuses me, of course connections breaking and steel fracturing have been demonstrated. There are a lot of books on the subject if you want further reading, but the only way I can make sense of post is if you are complaining that NIST did not recreate a large section of the towers and induce the same failure as occured on 911. If this is the case, I can only suggest that you begin fundraising, because such an exercise would be extremely expensive and difficult to achieve. You would also have to ensure it could be repeated with slightly different variables several times, so I wouldn't hold out much hope.

Originally posted by bsbray11
I hope you don't take offense to my curiosity, but I don't suppose I'm supposed to take this to mean you sympathize with fascism and submissive populations?

You are not, but there was little answer that could be given to your questions which would adequately explore the complexities of the subject. I prefer to stay out of such debates, and focus on the actual factual data available.

Originally posted by bsbray11
Whether you deem it to be reckless or not, it isn't a rigorous proof of anything in the classical sense of the word. They invalidated their results. If you'll entertain them with it, that's fine, but the models don't mean anything more than the parameters they put into them. That's the bottom line. And those parameters were arbitrary.

Not at all. This statement seems to indicate a deeper misunderstanding of how these problems are tackled. I will do my best to explain what I feel you might be missing.

Every value for any property has an error margin, and this error margin is what NIST explored with their models. The height of the towers for example, was 1368ft. But what is the margin of error on that? 1 ft? 1 inch? 1/16th inch? 1/512th inch? It is extremely unlikely that the towers were precisely 1368 feet tall but the minor inaccuracies are relatively irrelevant. Now think about the speed of the plane that impacted WTC1. What data do we have on that? Well we have two videos of it, but only one really suitable for analysis. So you use different types of analysis on it and eventually get the result of 443mph +/- 30mph. Now 30mph is a much larger uncertainty than the uncertainties for tower height, so how do we account for this?

The answer is to do exactly what NIST did, and what you seem to be criticising, that is to split the problem up and run several models with values over the entire range that the values may be. NIST did this and then compared the results of these simulations with the evidence we have.

I apologise if my answer here was somewhat long and rambling, but I couldn't think of a better way to phrase it. Uncertainty is a part of life, and NIST spent a lot of time looking at how reliable their predictions and experimentation was.

The point about the fire tests and their purpose, is of course, absolutely correct.

But I've found it to be a fruitless discussion to have.

Instead, I've found it somewhat more constructive to discuss the issue at hand on the terms that they put forth.

And then, if you can show their claims to be false - in this case, too high heat input in the model - the discussion can't get sidetracked into issues about the PURPOSE of the tests.

Originally posted by exponent

As a result, the samples recovered from WTC 7 do not prove any extraordinary temperatures. Having said that, the existence of the eutectic mixture was a surprise to many scientists, and remains one of the details not fully understood to this day. What it is definitely not, however, is evidence of explosives.

Edit: Actually, I was in error. Salt water IS considered a eutectic mixture. Go figure.

Bolded part: No crap Sherlock. (Ryan Mackey. Not you exponent) The eutectic mixture is possibly evidence of thermite/mate (a eutectic mixture in and of itself) and not explosives.

If this is Mackey's work, I am definately not impressed.

This is an excellent summary of the issue at hand, and it is important to note that Therm?te typically burns at well over 2000C, temperatures high enough to completely melt the steel, however this is not what was seen in the investigation and as such we can rule out direct thermite contact.

Thermite is a eutectic reaction in and of itself. So, Mr. Mackey's description of a eutectic reaction would also apply to thermite.

Rapid deterioration of the steel was a result of heating with oxidation in combination with intergranular melting due to the presence of sulfur. The formation of the eutectic mixture of iron oxide and iron sulfide lowers the temperature at which liquid can form in this steel. This strongly suggests that the temperatures in this region of the steel beam approached ~1,000ºC, forming the eutectic liquid by a process similar to making a “blacksmith’s weld” in a hand forge.

www.tms.org...

The bolding is of importance.

Let me ask you. If I put a 1,000,000 C flame to a block of ice and melt half of it, what temperature would the intergranular molecules show?

I'll give you a hint.

For one, ice melting is endothermic.

There are other chemical reactions that must absorb energy in order to proceed. These are endothermic reactions. Endothermic reactions cannot occur spontaneously. Work must be done in order to get these reactions to occur. When endothermic reactions absorb energy, a temperature drop is measured during the reaction. Endothermic reactions are characterized by positive heat flow (into the reaction) and an increase in enthalpy (+ΔH).

chemistry.about.com...

For another:

Temperature at which a substance melts, or changes from solid to liquid form. A pure substance under standard conditions of pressure (usually one atmosphere) has a definite melting point. If heat is supplied to a solid at its melting point, the temperature does not change until the melting process is complete. The melting point of ice is 0°C or 32°F.

www.tiscali.co.uk...

So, the answer would be 0C.

That is why the temperature of the steel did not go above it's melting point even in the presence of thermate. If all had melted, then it would continue to rise in temperature, but since they didn't test any of the slag's temperature, then how would they know how hot it got?





[edit on 11/24/2008 by Griff]

[edit on 11/24/2008 by Griff]

[edit on 11/24/2008 by Griff]

[edit on 11/24/2008 by Griff]

It is no joke, and those are not balconies. Those were apartments.

Then the construction was worse than I thought it was, but still poor construction, and entirely different from the WTC towers. You keep referring to the towers as progressive collapses as if someone has formally studied the actual collapses beyond their "initiation points." Do you have any kind of study or etc. you can refer me to where those physical mechanisms were studied?

The other building brought for comparison was the First Interstate Bank (now the Aon Center). This is not a terrible analogy but there are a few problems with it:
When compared to WTC1 or 2

• Scale. The Aon Centre is approximately 1/3rd the size (volume) of WTC1 or 2

This is not a problem for me, it is a problem for you. Just because the towers were bigger does not mean they would therefore be easier to bring down, if that's what you're implying. The towers actually had much larger columns, which are harder, not easier, to heat. The fires could not be expected to also be proportionally larger and more powerful in the towers, either.

Fireproofing. The lack of damage to the Aon Centre was attributed to well applied fireproofing. The impact of planes into WTC1 and 2, plus some doubt over the quality of applied fireproofing makes this quite an important point.

Griff knows a lot more about this but there were other fireproofings applied to the towers besides the spray-on fireproofing, that would not have come off as easily. I was never convinced in the first place that the impacts would have necessarily knocked anything off. In fact, you can see fireproofing still attached to the very exterior columns that the planes severed upon impact.

Magnitude of fire. Fires in WTC1 and 2 were ignited over more floors simultaneously than were involved in the fire at the Aon Centre.

I would say their "magnitudes" in terms of the amount of floor areas engulfed
were comparable in all fairness. The number of floors involved is one consideration, but many floors that had fire in the WTC towers were not very involved. There was one floor with a single isolated pocket of fire, and one floor below where firefighters were saying they only needed one line to knock it out there. I'm not even sure a single floor was fully involved at any given instant in either tower, but the FIB had at least its 15th floor fully involved at one point.

Firefighting. The fires in the Aon Centre were actively fought within minutes of the fire spreading to multiple floors

I would have to actually see the responses compared to see how big of a difference you are really talking about here.

Construction. While the diagram you've provided shows a superficially similar construction to the WTC, there are few details available and the diagram does not show any floor framing details.

You should elaborate more on the "superficial" relation seen. The FIB had exterior steel columns on the outside faces like the WTC towers, but it's exterior columns were much fewer and more widely spaced, while the towers had many more that were much tightly grouped together. The FIB had a core structure apparently using at least three steel columns, whereas the towers had 47 large steel box columns running most the lengths of their cores.

• Construction. WTC7s failure relies upon a unique construction invoving long span asymmetrical framing.

I find it odd people bring this up. It was asymmetrically constructed, yet it fell totally symmetrically. I don't want word games either because you are not going to be able to convince me that WTC7 falling straight down is not symmetrical, because I have seen it and I will assert it myself even if no one else wants to. Four corners of a roof line sinking simultaneously, because everything that is under them is also failing simultaneously in the same direction, is symmetry to me. And "simultaneously" means within the same fraction of a second. It even happened around a "kink" that served to minimize (not totally eliminate) damage to adjacent structures, which goes along with where most of the mass and its center of gravity remained.

Originally posted by bsbray11
Can you give me an example of something from one of their reports that illustrates your idea of the quality of these reports?

There is a lot to choose from, and I don't know whether you're looking for a sentence, a paragraph, a section or a paper. As it is particularly relevant to this thread, I will say that NCSTAR 1-5E is a good example of the work NIST did, and shows the quality of their work.

I was actually talking about something relevant to their investigation of the WTC, that illustrates the quality of their investigation. You're talking about sentences, paragraphs, and papers, which is all syntax and meaningless to me. I am fixated only on NIST's meaning, how they arrived at their hypothesis, and what they used to support it, and whether or not what they have done is as solid and logical as it could or even should have been for such an investigation. After all, this is the only real investigation we got for these buildings (in thinking it was really just a continuation of FEMA, re-using many of the same engineers). Do I really feel as though I understand what could have caused these skyscrapers to "fall" all the way to the ground like that? Absolutely not. And so I feel ripped off. They analyzed the "initiations," but the initiations of what? That is the "quality" I'm thinking of, when I think of these federal reports.

I'm really not sure what you're asking for here.

I am asking, who is supposed to be explaining how these columns are moving as WTC7 collapses? If we are looking at anything in the building as it collapses, to try to figure out what happened to it, shouldn't somebody be looking at the columns? Since when do skyscrapers fold down onto themselves like accordions, is basically what I'm wondering, and where those columns could have possibly have went. It would take enormous amounts of energy to keep bending them out of the way all the way down, and that's energy that did NOT come from the kinetic energy of the building because it accelerated right at 9.8m/s^2.

What is beyond our ability to simulate is what happens to single columns or even reasonable groups of them in collapses like the WTC or WTC7.

If three skyscrapers can fall straight down three times in a row in a single day, someone can at least generalize the behaviors and reproduce them as an example. I don't believe in that much luck, or freak coincidence or chance.

Originally posted by Griff
That is why the temperature of the steel did not go above it's melting point even in the presence of thermate. If all had melted, then it would continue to rise in temperature, but since they didn't test any of the slag's temperature, then how would they know how hot it got?

Steel melts at 1500C, not 1000C and the temperature applied can be determined through microscopy as far as I know. I am no expert though.

I don't see how you are using this as evidence of thermite when 1000C is potentially even below ignition temperature for thermite.

Originally posted by exponent
What I was suggesting was in response to your claiming NIST ignored a lot of the physical destruction.

You call it "a lot of physical destruction," I call it about the entirety of the actual "collapses," save only the first half-second initiating events (and you know they never did get around to being able to tell what exactly was being "initiated").

My point was and is that if you believe that the towers may have been taken down by a controlled demolition,

You know I really haven't even brought up controlled demolition yet. I have been talking the whole time about NIST's hypothesis and why their report is not to my satisfaction. What I see you trying to do is squirm away from the questions I'm asking and try to turn the spotlight on me, so to speak, to try and force me to come to conclusions on things that I can't possibly be expected to know. I have said over and over, just because one hypothesis or theory is bad, does not mean I have to pull another out of my sleeve to immediately replace it. If a theory is not replaced immediately by another, and we simply realize we have been mistaken and still have not found a satisfactory answer, the apocalypse isn't going to occur. And it's not required by any scientific standards that I was ever taught. But I do think you are trying to change the subject.

I think it is unlikely that whatever theory you subscribe to, it doesn't include control over the initiation of collapse.

What "control" over the initiation are you talking about? If something is "controlled," unless it is "controlled" by nature how are you not suggesting something done intentionally by a person?

I wouldn't say there should be much "control" in a building collapsing from asymmetrical damage and asymmetrical fire distributions (meaning asymmetrical load distributions, things should not suddenly fail on all four sides plus the core structure, instantly), especially when there is no particularly good evidence or even similar cases to support the idea that those two things alone should have caused two skyscrapers to collapse like that in the first place. They withstood the impacts with capacity to spare even by the official reports, and fire has never before or since been a problem for steel skyscrapers. Deformations occur, yes, slight expansions and sagging if enough heat is transferred (no 2MW gas blow torches, please). Deformations have never been demonstrated to lead to runaway global collapse situations. That's just one more of those critical things NIST would really need to support its hypothesis, and should want to investigate simply because it's a new phenomenon that is potentially disastrous, but it isn't there in the 10,000 pages. That does not make a strong case to me.

Whether you have a fully developed theory or not is somewhat irrelevant

Actually, the "theory" you assume I have is irrelevant. We weren't talking about that, because I never brought it up. We were talking about NIST. I have said and I will continue to repeat to you that I was never paid to develop a theory or write a report to the public.

The question is, "Was NIST using this spray burner to replicate conditions inside the towers?". The answer is no, they weren't at all. This is an erroneous conclusion which has been replicated throughout the truther community.

Well if this is out of the way, I just wonder if NIST ever did try to replicate those conditions in a lab. That's still what I am looking for.

As you can see, these tests were designed to check how accurately NISTs simulator code would simulate a fire with well known details.

That's fine, too. The relevant information I would really be looking for here, then, would be what sorts of parameters they were running through their simulations and how they decided upon them. I already know they didn't run just one simulation, and that they admitted to having to raise parameters to begin getting the numbers they were looking for, which would still all be unacceptable to me unless they could justify the parameters.

Originally posted by exponent

Think of ice mixed with salt – independently, water melts at 0 C while the melting temperature of salt is rather high, but the saltwater mixture melts at -10 C or even lower depending on the concentration. Something similar is happening with this steel sample. Somehow it has acquired sulfur, and though the eutectic mixture has not melted, it could melt at a lower temperature than ordinary steel.

"Somehow" the steel has acquired a chemical additive that just happens to lower its melting point by a good 500 C. Can we get a little more info on that, please?

As a result, the samples recovered from WTC 7 do not prove any extraordinary temperatures.

"Extraordinary temperatures" are not my concern and I'm really not sure we're even talking about the same steel sample. If we are, I would defer to the people who have analyzed it and how their methods differed and why they achieved contradictory results.

[edit on 24-11-2008 by bsbray11]

Originally posted by bsbray11
Then the construction was worse than I thought it was, but still poor construction, and entirely different from the WTC towers. You keep referring to the towers as progressive collapses as if someone has formally studied the actual collapses beyond their "initiation points." Do you have any kind of study or etc. you can refer me to where those physical mechanisms were studied?

The construction was quite bad, and was very different to the WTC towers, but even so they suffered from a similar vulnerability. With regards to the "physical mechanisms" of collapse, I presume you've seen the papers by Bazant, Bazant+Greening and by Urich? These papers study the energy sinks involved in a progressive collapse of the towers and find that the available gravitational energy is more than sufficient. If you are looking for information on how columns buckle under axial load, then I recommend engineering handbooks. Griff can advise better on that topic.

This is not a problem for me, it is a problem for you. Just because the towers were bigger does not mean they would therefore be easier to bring down, if that's what you're implying. The towers actually had much larger columns, which are harder, not easier, to heat. The fires could not be expected to also be proportionally larger and more powerful in the towers, either.

Unfortunately it's a problem for both of us, because strength does not scale linearly we cannot easily make comparisons between the two.

Griff knows a lot more about this but there were other fireproofings applied to the towers besides the spray-on fireproofing, that would not have come off as easily.

The only other fireproofing in place was gypsum wallboards surrounding elevators / columns. The fireproofing on the floors was purely spray-on.

I was never convinced in the first place that the impacts would have necessarily knocked anything off. In fact, you can see fireproofing still attached to the very exterior columns that the planes severed upon impact.

NIST has conducted experiments on this but if you truly believe that a jet impacting a tower at ~500mph isn't going to do some severe damage to lightweight foam then I doubt I can convince you by showing you tests.

I would say their "magnitudes" in terms of the amount of floor areas engulfed
were comparable in all fairness. The number of floors involved is one consideration, but many floors that had fire in the WTC towers were not very involved. There was one floor with a single isolated pocket of fire, and one floor below where firefighters were saying they only needed one line to knock it out there.

Not exactly but you're close enough, lets not forget the large difference in floor areas in each tower.

I'm not even sure a single floor was fully involved at any given instant in either tower, but the FIB had at least its 15th floor fully involved at one point.

I am not aware of the details regarding this specifically but you seem to be trying to argue that they were comparable based on the highest floor being fully involved, but this goes against NISTs collapse mechanism and as such you can't be comparing them based on this.

I would have to actually see the responses compared to see how big of a difference you are really talking about here.

Firefighers were on-scene within 20 minutes of the first fire indications and were fighting the fire approximately 30 minutes later.

You should elaborate more on the "superficial" relation seen. The FIB had exterior steel columns on the outside faces like the WTC towers, but it's exterior columns were much fewer and more widely spaced, while the towers had many more that were much tightly grouped together. The FIB had a core structure apparently using at least three steel columns, whereas the towers had 47 large steel box columns running most the lengths of their cores.

Indeed, while this looks to be somewhat similar to the WTC, there are important questions to be asked, such as whether the floors were beam or truss framed, what were the typical beam spans etc. The WTC tower collapses rely on long span truss structures sagging extensively in heat. Short span beam framed floors are significantly less vulnerable to this (as far as I can see as a non-engineer).

I find it odd people bring this up. It was asymmetrically constructed, yet it fell totally symmetrically. I don't want word games either because you are not going to be able to convince me that WTC7 falling straight down is not symmetrical, because I have seen it and I will assert it myself even if no one else wants to. Four corners of a roof line sinking simultaneously, because everything that is under them is also failing simultaneously in the same direction, is symmetry to me. And "simultaneously" means within the same fraction of a second. It even happened around a "kink" that served to minimize (not totally eliminate) damage to adjacent structures, which goes along with where most of the mass and its center of gravity remained.

You're obviously ignoring the east penthouse failure here but I have no problem saying that the global collapse phase of WTC7 kept the roofline remarkably level. NIST does not have a particularly good explanation for this but their models do show the predicted series of progressive horizontal failures in the core structure which resulted in this level collapse.

I was actually talking about something relevant to their investigation of the WTC, that illustrates the quality of their investigation. You're talking about sentences, paragraphs, and papers, which is all syntax and meaningless to me. I am fixated only on NIST's meaning, how they arrived at their hypothesis, and what they used to support it, and whether or not what they have done is as solid and logical as it could or even should have been for such an investigation.

NIST NCSTAR 1-5E deals with their modelling of the fires taking place in the buildings. As such it's quite critical to their theory in general.

After all, this is the only real investigation we got for these buildings (in thinking it was really just a continuation of FEMA, re-using many of the same engineers). Do I really feel as though I understand what could have caused these skyscrapers to "fall" all the way to the ground like that? Absolutely not. And so I feel ripped off. They analyzed the "initiations," but the initiations of what? That is the "quality" I'm thinking of, when I think of these federal reports.

I think perhaps you've only read NCSTAR 1? There are extensive discussions on failure mechanisms throughout the report, especially NCSTAR 1-6. After the initiation however we have to rely on simplified models as the situation becomes more complex.

I am asking, who is supposed to be explaining how these columns are moving as WTC7 collapses? If we are looking at anything in the building as it collapses, to try to figure out what happened to it, shouldn't somebody be looking at the columns?

I explained this above, with complex situations like this, the best way to look at it is in terms of energy available and energy used in deformation of columns. WTC7 is of course less well studied and we have less data available than for WTC1 and 2 but allow me to ask you this:

What do you think are the chances that WTC7 was a controlled demolition, but WTC1 and 2 weren't?

Originally posted by bsbray11
Griff knows a lot more about this but there were other fireproofings applied to the towers besides the spray-on fireproofing, that would not have come off as easily. I was never convinced in the first place that the impacts would have necessarily knocked anything off. In fact, you can see fireproofing still attached to the very exterior columns that the planes severed upon impact.

Actually, Dr. Quintiere would be the one to consult for this.

James Quintiere, Ph.D., former Chief of the Fire Science Division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), has called for an independent review of NIST’s investigation into the collapses of the World Trade Center Towers on 9/11.

“I think the official conclusion that NIST arrived at is questionable,” explained Dr. Quintiere. “Let's look at real alternatives that might have been the cause of the collapse of the World Trade Towers and how that relates to the official cause and what's the significance of one cause versus another.”

3. Spoliation of a fire scene is a basis for destroying a legal case in an investigation. Most of the steel was discarded, although the key elements of the core steel were demographically labeled. A careful reading of the NIST report shows that they have no evidence that the temperatures they predict as necessary for failure are corroborated by findings of the little steel debris they have. Why hasn't NIST declared that this spoliation of the steel was a gross error?

5. Testing by NIST has been inconclusive. Although they have done fire tests of the scale of several work stations, a replicate test of at least & [sic] of a WTC floor would have been of considerable value. Why was this not done? ...

www.opednews.com...

2. It needs to be clearly demonstrated how the core column insulation was removed.
This cannot simply be based on an assumption or an extrapolation from impact
calculations. It is too important to the conclusions to have modeling as the sole
basis. Sandia has been experimenting with airplane crashes into buildings. Have
they been consulted for supporting information or assistance? NIST needs to live
up to the Daubert-rulling in civil case law, and demonstrate a clear methodology
for their conclusion that the insulation was removed.

Finally, NIST needs to clarify inconsistencies that appear in their public information to
date. These inconsistencies and apparent weakness lead me to question their collapse
theory, and place the collapse cause more on the lack of sufficient truss insulation.
1. NIST metallurgical analyses show no core columns from the fire floors reached
temperatures above 250 C. It is claimed that this information is consistent with
computer modeling. Moreover, I was pleased to see that after many inquiries for
microscopic analysis of the steel debris, it was done and reported in the October
briefing. The importance of forensic evidence to document the temperatures
3
reached of the steel cannot be overlooked. First, its consistency with the
modeling has little significance since the modeling cannot have that level of
detailed accuracy precise fire effects around the core columns. Secondly, the core
column theory requires that the columns got sufficiently hot, say 500 C, and
tangible evidence from metallurgical analysis is crucial in supporting the NIST
conclusion. Unfortunately, that evidence has not been found by NIST. Thirdly,
as a consequence, this crucial lack of evidence must indict the selling of the WTC
steel debris before an investigation could be launched. Will NIST speak to this as
they now have future investigative authority?

www.nist.gov...

If three skyscrapers can fall straight down three times in a row in a single day, someone can at least generalize the behaviors and reproduce them as an example. I don't believe in that much luck, or freak coincidence or chance.

Agree totally.

[edit on 11/24/2008 by Griff]

[edit on 11/24/2008 by Griff]

Originally posted by exponent
Steel melts at 1500C, not 1000C and the temperature applied can be determined through microscopy as far as I know. I am no expert though.

A eutectic reaction would melt steel at 1000C.

If you don't believe me, then can you post evidence of the steel getting above this temperature?

If it never got above this temperature and you claim that steel melts at 1500C, how did the steel melt then if not with the aid of a eutectic reaction?

I don't see how you are using this as evidence of thermite when 1000C is potentially even below ignition temperature for thermite.

Obviously there is a disconnect between heat and temperature.

You can add 1 million degrees C of heat to a block of ice but the ice will remain (even the intergranular composition of the ice) at a temperature of 0 degrees C until the entire block of ice is molten.

Therefore, you can add 2,000 degrees of heat from thermite (the temperature it reacts) but the steel will only get to a temperature of 1000 degrees C (the temperature the eutectic reaction causes the steel to melt) until the entire piece of steel is molten.

Question: Did they find the temperature of the melted steel (slag) or did they find the temperature of the steel that remained solid?

If you can't understand this concept when it comes into play about steel melting, then I can't help you.

Originally posted by exponent
The only other fireproofing in place was gypsum wallboards surrounding elevators / columns. The fireproofing on the floors was purely spray-on.

This is erroneous.

NIST has conducted experiments on this but if you truly believe that a jet impacting a tower at ~500mph isn't going to do some severe damage to lightweight foam then I doubt I can convince you by showing you tests.

How about 2-inches of solid gypsum block? Does that come off as easily? Did NIST test this material? How about 1 7/8-inch of gypsum plaster with metal lath?

[edit on 11/24/2008 by Griff]

Originally posted by exponent
With regards to the "physical mechanisms" of collapse, I presume you've seen the papers by Bazant, Bazant+Greening and by Urich?

I've only seen Bazant's first paper before the NIST report and I know it didn't cover it. If the other two offer explanations as to how the collapse physically progressed, are they just theoretical, or have they been to a lab yet? I remember Greening trying to model the WTC collapses with 1 dimension, basically just adding the KE of one floor to the next to the next, etc., like an exercise in arithmetic, and I lost about any respect I could have had for him as a competent scientist at that point.

These papers study the energy sinks involved in a progressive collapse of the towers and find that the available gravitational energy is more than sufficient.

That doesn't mean anything if you don't know how that energy was actually physically used to destroy the towers as they were. You don't really even know how much of that energy would have been absorbed at each theoretical impact of each floor upon the next, because, for one thing, all the structural documentation isn't available, and for another, impacting loading upon steel structures ("pancaking") has never been studied in any depth. Dr. Astaneh-Asl that worked for FEMA, and criticized the ASCE, was studying that very phenomenon one a month or two before 9/11, and the only other reference I've seen any scholars be able to produce is of a paper by Calladine and English from the 1980's.

As far as their being able to calculate that there even would have been sufficient energy at all, they are really just making guesses anyway. Jim Hoffman did the same kind of thing, but came up with different results. The difference is that they added and subtracted different things and used different numbers in some cases. Jim Hoffman subtracted a large amount of the available energy to expand the dust clouds, for example. I remember following along with it some months ago, and there were disputes over all of it, how much concrete should be pulverized into dust and how fine the particles should be, etc. Some of those things scale to their energy requirements exponentially, like accounting for some of the incredibly fine dust takes exponentially more energy than much coarser concrete dust. If you tweak the numbers to within limits any particular person might find "reasonable," you could show either one or the other.

If you are looking for information on how columns buckle under axial load, then I recommend engineering handbooks.

That's a complete cop-out. There is absolutely no precedent for crushing 47 stories of thick, thick steel columns into a 3 or 4 story debris pile. It's going to take more than two words to explain how those columns moved out of the way without putting up any sort of resistance. If you're going to be just as intellectually lazy as NIST then there's really no point in me complaining about them to you.

Unfortunately it's a problem for both of us, because strength does not scale linearly

I'm not talking strength, I'm talking about the amount of heat that steel is going to absorb before it starts glowing and trying to expand. You have at least twice as much steel in the columns of the WTC. I have a feeling you are not going to need less and less heat energy the more and more mass you are dealing with, and that would be at least a linear relationship.

NIST has conducted experiments

...with shot guns. I admit I've never looked at that test in depth but it isn't off to a good start in my mind.

if you truly believe that a jet impacting a tower at ~500mph isn't going to do some severe damage to lightweight foam

What was that light gray stuff still hanging to the exterior columns that the planes sliced through?

then I doubt I can convince you by showing you tests.

You couldn't convince me by showing me the test you probably have in mind, no. Anyway Griff just posted what all else was fireproofing the steel and where it was at. There was still asbestos in there, too.

I am not aware of the details regarding this specifically but you seem to be trying to argue that they were comparable based on the highest floor being fully involved

It being the highest floor had nothing to do with what I was saying, just being fully involved says to me that that floor had about as much heat energy as it was going to get, and the steel making up that floor was getting about as much exposure to that fire as it was going to get.

but this goes against NISTs collapse mechanism

What collapse mechanism? You mean their initiation, or what?

The WTC tower collapses rely on long span truss structures sagging extensively in heat.

That was the hypothesis anyway. They never demonstrated how much force a sagging truss is going to exert on an exterior column to pull it inwards. The exterior columns were bolted end-to-end and had spandrel plates connecting them, too, which would have made them harder to deflect like that. I have never seen any free body diagrams or anything relating to this.

with complex situations like this, the best way to look at it is in terms of energy available and energy used in deformation of columns.

I'm not convinced that is really the "best" way. I know for a fact you aren't going to be able to reach a verifiable conclusion that way.

What do you think are the chances that WTC7 was a controlled demolition, but WTC1 and 2 weren't?

My personal opinion, is not good. "Controlled demolition" is just a term, it can mean what you like, but I think all three buildings had additional energy thrown into the equation in some form or another.

[edit on 24-11-2008 by bsbray11]

Originally posted by bsbray11

Originally posted by exponent

Think of ice mixed with salt – independently, water melts at 0 C while the melting temperature of salt is rather high, but the saltwater mixture melts at -10 C or even lower depending on the concentration. Something similar is happening with this steel sample. Somehow it has acquired sulfur, and though the eutectic mixture has not melted, it could melt at a lower temperature than ordinary steel.

"Somehow" the steel has acquired a chemical additive that just happens to lower its melting point by a good 500 C. Can we get a little more info on that, please?

Exactly bsbray. When we throw an egg into some bags of flour and sugar, and light it on fire, do we get a wedding cake at the end?

I'd like to know just how this eutectic reaction occured. And if it was just unique to the building materials of the WTC complex. If so, shouldn't someone have to answer for this?

Or would the better scenario be that the WTC site used standard building materials and something else caused this?

Either way, the fact it is being ignored concerns me.